Reviews

Toowoomba Repertory Theatre teed off their 2018 season with The Ladies Foursome, a comedy staged around a friendly game of golf. Three long-term friends (Tate, Margot and Connie), one player short due to the untimely death of their usual fourth (Cathy) are joined by a newcomer (Dory). Each hole on the course is a chance for the group to grapple with the game and parallel revelations about their friendships – especially why Cathy never mentioned Dory over many years of weekly golf meet-ups.

According to the Oxford dictionary, burlesque is “A variety show, typically including striptease.” However, as I discovered watching Hot Sauce Burlesque, it is so much more!

Yes, the girls do take their clothes off and show us what they can do with their tassels, but it is obvious that there is a real sisterhood between them. When not performing they are sitting at the side of the audience in robes encouraging each other.

Melville Theatre’s Venus in Fur, written by David Ives, is a dynamic and expertly presented two-hander that had the audience on the edge of their seats.

Set in New York, Thomas Novachek is directing his own adaptation of Venus in Fur, and lamenting the suitability of the actresses who have auditioned for lead character Wanda von Dunayev, when actress Vanda Jordan crashes into the room and demands an audition. Despite seeming obviously unsuitable, her reading is amazing and the lines between the novel, the play and life become increasingly blurred.

Homer’s epic 2,800 year old poem Iliad describes a few weeks in the final year of the siege against the city of Troy, in particular the quarrel between King Agamemnon and Achilles.  In Memorial: An excavation of the Iliad, published in 2011, author Alice Oswald set out to translate the Iliad’s atmosphere, it’s ‘enargeia’ rather than its story. In doing so she has stripped the Iliad of its narrative and drawn forth the biographies and brutal killings of the 215 soldiers Homer named.