Tiddas the play helps put the word Brisbane into Brisbane Festival, writes Phil Brown

REVIEW: It’s Anita Heiss’s racy play about race relations but Tiddas is so much more and it promises to be one of the hits of this year’s Brisbane Festival, writes Phil Brown.

It’s a play not a lecture but Tiddas is laden with messages as well as jacaranda blooms. The blooms, the first of this jacaranda season, hang above the stage like some sort of heavenly cloud in purple and that’s intentional. Jacaranda blooms are a motif author and playwright Anita Heiss employs in her love letter to Brisbane.

On opening night she was wearing purple while lavender cocktails were served to those who like a drink. If some like that drink too much there is a message in the play about that too.

This work, presented in the Roundhouse Theatre at Kelvin Grove by La Boite theatre company, is a collaboration between them, Brisbane Festival and QPAC.

It is a page to stage version of Heiss’s much loved novel, Tiddas, which featured jacaranda blooms on the cover.

Heiss moved to Brisbane a few years ago. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out the special things about Queensland’s capital city.

Tiddas the play is based on Anita Heiss’s acclaimed novel of the same name. Picture: Supplied

It features a powerhouse of local talent ... Chenoa Deemal as Ellen, Anna McMahon as Veronica, Louise Brehmer as Nadine (the one who ends up hitting the bottle), Phoebe Grainger as Izzy and Shakira Clanton as Xanthe.

These friends have a book club that convenes at wine o’clock (much like my wife’s book club!) and when they get together their diverse backgrounds, with the accent on First Nations folk, bring into focus a lot of issues facing First Nations peoples and Australians society as whole.

Tiddas is an indigenous term for sisters. These women are sisters and their relationship is suitably fractious at times.

They have partners too. Sean Dow plays Richard, Asher, Spencer, Craig and Rory and he’s busy on stage, boy is he busy. I loved the way he dashed off as one character and ran back on as another. Hilarious and admirable at the same time.

The girls are all terrific and the set by Zoe Rouse is great and forms a comfortable backdrop as we eavesdrop on the relationships between these them. In some ways this is quite an old fashioned play, one that focuses on dialogue and the interaction between characters without too many bells and whistles.

A book club with a difference in Tiddas. The Anita Heiss play is presented in collaboration with La Boite theatre company, Brisbane Festival and QPAC and with performances at the Roundhouse Theatre in Kelvin Grove. Picture: Supplied

The writing is clever and funny and realistic and you believe these characters completely. You learn to love them, too, along the way. There are dramas, of course, regarding marriages and babies and alcohol intake.

It was also interesting to see Anita Heiss plugging Alcoholics Anonymous in an age when many professionals are trying to get problem drinkers to drink socially when abstinence is always the best way to deal with the disease.

These touches give the play veracity and there is constant humour, sometimes bawdy, to keep you enthralled for ... I was going to say 90 minutes but I think it went a bit longer than that.

Like just about everything I see in the theatre nowadays, it was a tad too long and I reckon a bit of judicious tightening would enhance it. That said, it’s a very entertaining night in the theatre and one of those plays that really helps put the Brisbane in Brisbane Festival.

But, note to la Boite ... please try to start on time.

Opening night’s performance started 20 minutes late. Just saying.

Tiddas is on now through to September 24.

For more information please visit laboite.com.au