Reviews

Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is a form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted - created spontaneously by the performers. In the case of the tightly performed 60 minutes of Letters To The Editor, the audience, using a random ‘marker pen voting model’ (possibly useful for the slew of upcoming elections across the country), choose a letter from the day’s local paper. In our case the theme and heading was, ‘Truth Telling’ done with a political flavour.

We were lucky to see the QSO perform in their studio for the first time in 2022 – given that their instruments were stuck in a storage room and couldn't be accessed due to the recent flooding in Brisbane. So, the musicians had to beg, borrow and steal replacements and fast-track their rehearsal time to only one week! That did not alter the top notch musicianship on display in the intimate space of the studio in the ABC's building on South Bank – which rises up an incline just enough to have missed the damage caused by the rising river.

On a large graffiti wall that punches out from the otherwise simple set, coarse one-word insults and tribal sports team tributes dominate a more poignant scrawl: ‘I adored you. You left me behind’.  It’s one of the recurring themes of Brothers, a new play by Kerry Drumm, premiering here at the Adelaide Fringe, before touring to its Edinburgh older sibling.

Margery Forde’s Snapshots From Home calls for an ensemble cast who can sing. It’s ideal for community theatre and Villanova Players’ production, their second, captured the spirit, the fun, and the heartbreak of those stuck at home during the Second World War.

Originally a Prime of Life Arts Project, Forde culled through over six-hundred pages of oral history from 24 men and women from Queensland to extract a memoir theatre-piece. A mammoth achievement but one that saw her rewarded with a Writers’ Guild Awgie in 1996.