Created by Why Not Theatre, The RISER Project is a new initiative that pairs established companies with emerging artists to share resources and make producing indie theatre just a little bit easier. The inaugural RISER season is taking place at The Theatre Centre with two shows already wrapped and another two currently on stage. […]
As I walked out of Ballad of the Burning Star Tuesday night at the Theatre Centre, I ran into a friend walking into another show (Burnish, I believe). When he asked what Ballad was about, I said, with a kind of syncopated energy: “well, it’s a devised theatre piece, but it’s also very movement based, like […]
Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’ bold dismantling of the betrayal of Jesus envisions a purgatorial world known as “Hope” where even the most easily damnable deserve consideration and possibly even salvation. It’s a hugely ambitious play with a massive cast of characters- gods and saints and devils, icons and angels and people- an anachronistic allegory that […]
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle was considered controversial when it was first written in 1976. Much has changed in the past 40 years, and yet this is still a controversial play in terms of its depiction of sexual violence and the performance of disability. As such, the question why stage this play was at the […]
Umnikelo (Offering)
The opening night of Luyanda Sidiya’s double-bill performances of Umnikelo and Dominion was dedicated to putting an end to xenophobic violence…
Tom at the Farm (Buddies in Bad Times) This gorgeous and disturbing piece of personal theatre from Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard is one of the first truly great productions I’ve seen this year. Making its English language debut through Linda Gaboriau’s poetic and honest translation, Tom at the Farm is staged with searing insight […]
Creditors (Coal Mine Theatre) The final piece in Coal Mine Theatre’s fantastically successful inaugural season is a dark domestic drama from August Stringberg set in a 19th century world of rampant misogyny and even more rampant psychotic jealousy. The solid production benefits greatly from director Rae Ellen Bodie’s background in dialect coaching (there’s a clarity […]
With a disarming amount of charm, South African performance artist Steven Cohen brought his infamous Chandelier to the final week of the Canadian Stage Spotlight on South Africa festival. We hear him before we see him, the sound of glass pieces jingling together fills the theatre moments before he enters slowly and deliberating from the […]