This year’s Brisbane Festival has plenty of theatre on offer. Take a seat at the hottest club in town with Gatsby at The Green Light, a circus-meets-cabaret soirée, inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, co-created and directed by Craig Ilott. Back to Bilo explores the grassroots campaign that brought Priya and Nades (asylum seekers from war-torn Sri Lanka) and their two young daughters home to Biloela in rural Queensland. (See page 65.) Congratulations, Get Rich! by Merlynn Tong also has its world premiere, directed by La Boite Artistic Director Courtney Stewart. Set in a karaoke venue, this vibrant Asian-Australian drama celebrates three powerful women in a supernatural tale. Meanwhile, Shake & Stir Theatre Co presents a new production of Laura Murphy’s pop-infused musical The Lovers inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Nick Skubij directs a top cast including Natalie Abbott, Jason Arrow, Jayme-Lee Hanekom, Loren Hunter, Stellar Parry and Mat Verevis.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Priya and Nades left war-torn Sri Lanka and found each other in regional Queensland. They married, had two daughters, worked hard and settled into a simple but happy country life.

The community welcomed them with open arms — but four years later came a knock at the door and they were ripped away in a dawn raid.

Their story could have ended there, but a brave band of Biloela women weren’t giving up on them so easily.

Fighting alongside the young refugee family, they launched a grassroots, people-powered campaign that galvanised hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians to demand the family be brought back to Bilo. This is the remarkable true account of one family’s ordeal in the nightmare limbo of immigration detention, a story of how love is stronger than fear and of how persistence and togetherness can win against crushing odds.