Book clubs are one of the oldest excuses for groups of women to get together and share secrets, dinner and copious amounts of wine.

Anita Heiss’s 2014 novel Tiddas, and now play of the same name running at Belvoir this Sydney Festival, follows five “tiddas” (sisters) who’ve been inseparable since their Mudgee high school days, and the happenings in and around their monthly book club meetings.

It’s something like The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – if it was set in Brisbane – complete with directly contrasting big life events and the struggle to relate to each other in an increasingly difficult world.

But where the novel expertly weaves partners, lives, and tragedies between book club quibbles and laughs, the play struggles to capture the same complexities and character development.

Jade Lomas-Ronan, Perry Mooney and Lara Croydon in Tiddas. Photo © Stephen Wilson Barker

An almost direct translation of the novel’s various scenes onto the stage, this play sets a huge task for itself by including several locations, times, and events in quick succession.

Book club meetings are intercut with short glimpses of each of the tiddas’ separate lives, and because we don’t...