Flooded is set on a boat, but not just any boat. One warm and sunny (thank god) Toronto July evening I found myself on The Pirate Life Boat sailing around the Toronto Islands, witnessing a beautiful, funny, and intense spectacle. Directed by Ara Glenn-Johanson, the production consists of four performers (Hayden Finkelshtain, Melanie Leon, Duncan […]
Soulpepper’s Of Human Bondage features a strong cast of talented actors, and some truly innovative staging. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to save the production from a tiresome story filled with unlikeable characters. Of Human Bondage is a solid production. But if you don’t like stories about selfish people making selfish decisions while barely growing or […]
Immigrants. Gentrification. Two subjects that are inescapable when living in New York City. Sometimes it’s easy for New Yorkers to think we have the monopoly on them (as we like to think we have a monopoly on everything). But the Torontonian theater company Soulpepper proves otherwise with Kim’s Convenience, which handles heavy issues with sharp humor […]
The big joke of Ink is that a play about a dumb, sordid newspaper is itself dumb and sordid. The audience doesn’t realise that, Rupert Goold doesn’t, James Graham doesn’t. But it is. Dumb. Sordid. Describing a play as ‘sordid’ makes me sound puritan. But it’s not the content that’s sordid, although Ink is about […]
The Royal Court’s associate designer, Chloe Lamford, got five writers ‘exploring performance through language, physicality and the power of the imagination’. They wrote a piece each. I caught two of those. I’ll be writing this review in past tense because the plays were on for three nights, and I wanted time to think over them. […]
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pined after her and she rejected his multiple proposals of marriage. She was the muse for German-language Poet Rainer Maria Rilke who fell in love with her and she remained his confidante for life. She was one of the first female psychoanalysts having convinced Sigmund Freud to accept her into his inner […]
Echo Productions’ latest production, Context, attempts to recreate the subjective experience of anxiety. One hour long, the show first depicts the evening of Jamie, a burgeoning artist, who attends an art show after being absent from the community for quite some time. They then retrace the same events, but from Jamie’s perspective, highlighting her emotional […]
We all have bad experiences with teachers; some are worse than others. Jam tells the story of a history teacher named Bella (Jasmine Hyde) who, haunted by a rough past with an old student, has moved towns in an attempt to start a new life. Ten years later, Kane (Harry Melling) visits her classroom in […]