Food

Since assuming office, La Boite AD David Berthold has made a consistent effort to involve dance within his programming. Food is the latest example – an already critically acclaimed co-production between Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre Company and dance theatre ensemble Force Majeure making its Brisbane debut with La Boite. It's a thoroughly entertaining work. The tale of two estranged sisters reinventing their mother's diner as a restaurant in regional Australia – a far more human story than one would expect, given its alchemical origins. Frequently treading dangerously close to cliché, it nevertheless triumphs where other works of similar premise have fallen short, largely on account of script and performances. 

Steve Rodgers' rapid-fire portraits of Australian adolescence and masterful grasp of our eccentricities of language are amazing and oddly affecting to behold. It's the kind of work that will hit you with nostalgia in the strangest of places. Kate Box as bruised, left-behind older sister Elmer, meanwhile, is immaculate. Harsh, funny and hurt so badly, she will make you ache in sympathy. There are a number of niggling problems. Kate Champion's choreography only gels occasionally (though, when it does, it's predictably astounding). Fayssal Bazzi's Turkish tourist is simply underwritten. Fortunately, there's more than enough heart and humour on display to overlook such shortcomings.

La Boite Theatre to Saturday 27 April