London in 1966 has been brought back to life in the dark and smoky setting of the Old Red Lion. The Local Stigmatic by Heathcote Williams tells the story of Graham and Ray, two men with sociopathic tendencies obsessed with betting on dogs and following mildly famous actors around the city. The plot may sound […]
A Reason to Talk, produced by Why Not Theatre, has already started when you walk into the Theatre Centre mainspace. There creator Sachli Gholamalizad holds old family photos up to her laptop’s camera, which are projected in real time on to the screen above her. In this evocative way, Gholamalizad introduces us to the subtle […]
Kahn (playwright Fabrizio Filippo), a tech genius, has died and his friends and colleagues, both intimate and estranged, are summoned to an unremarkable airport hotel for the reading of the will. Once they are there, Kahn continues to manipulate the strings from beyond the grave. There are baffling levels of bureaucracy, and a man named Quentin […]
It starts weak and ends strong. For a play about a physically-disabled protagonist, it pays to have the action centre on how he cares for others rather than himself. Despite a heap of flaws, Chips Hardy’s decade-old play achieves something resembling poignant, even if it takes an hour to get there. Wheelchair-bound veteran Moss (Darren […]
John Steinbeck’s novella is such a staple of middle and high school reading lists that it may be easy (in my experience, at least) for it to blend into a series of vaguely recalled Western frontier archetypes typical of The American Novel, ranches and all. Unit 102’s intimately staged production of the author’s self-penned stage […]
Scarberia (Young People’s Theatre) As the lights dimmed on Evan Placey’s coast-jumping, Shakespeare-referencing, mind-bending one-act about two sets of teenage boys tied together by a young woman who goes missing in Scarborough, Ontario and shows up in Scarborough, England, the early-high school audience began muttering that it was “too complicated” and “confusing”. It is really […]
Theatre is an art but it is also a medium through which one can express his or her opinions about certain societal realities that are oftentimes not talked about. Tonight I’ll be April does exactly that. The play brings to the stage mental health struggles and physical abuse towards men—two problems left in the dark. […]
The Archivist as a title for a performance piece suggests an exploration of a reserved, organized and knowledgeable figure. It can also suggest someone with a degree of detachment from the material they are curating; when I think of archivists, I think of slightly senior employees who labour away in the bowels of an institution, […]