Trent Dalton's Love Stories, a QPAC / Brisbane Festival production, Canberra Theatre, 24-27 September - subsequent tour to Darwin Entertainment Centre (2 – 4 October) and HOTA Gold Coast (9 – 11 October).

 A writer sits in a public square asking people to tell him about their love stories. A simple premise, played here with a mix of storytelling, video, and choreography, looking at all types of love (romantic, familial, friendships, even self-actualisation). It's a technically sophisticated telling of these stories, beginning with live video of the audience and various written declarations from the audience of their definition of love. We're introduced to the writer (Jason Klarwein), and the location, a busy pedestrian mall in Brisbane, where various regulars approach the writer with their stories or where their story is pulled out of them - with stories mixing from being told directly the audience, playing out told directly to a wandering camerman (Anthony Dyer) or in a couple of instances just played on the big screen on the back of the stage. The stories are tied together by a framing device about the writer's own relationship with his wife (Anna McGahan) but the heart and the soul of the show is some immactulate ensemble work from the cast - including the radiant Valerie Bader, the warmly yearning Bryan Proberts, the stoicly strong Kirk Page, the joyous Will Tran, the heart-rending Ngoc Phan and the warm movements between Jacob Watton and Hsin-Ju Ely. 

It's spectacularly well technically managed, with life editing and effects work from video systems tech Josh Braithwaite, and uses the full size of the Canberra theatre stage better than a lot of attempts to put plays on the bigger theatre - often plays can get swallowed whole by the space which lives more comfortably with concerts, but this one manages to fill the theatre to the back row with heart, soul and theatrical skill. If it's very much a Queensland story put on tour, well, all universal stories are local stories at their heart, and the specifics make the universal elements stand out more. Director Sam Strong and adapter Tim McGarry integrate the combination of spectacle and human moments well, with the assistance of choreographer Nerida Matthaei. It's simultaneously the simplest posisble thing - storytelling between cast and audience - and utilising the finest of modern tech to do that, and it never trips over its feet once in doing that.