I’ve seen a lot of theatre this November but nothing’s surprised me quite like Echo Productions’ Dog Sees God, a tiny, under-marketed labour of love with only one week left in The Second City’s John Candy Box Theatre around the corner and two flights up from the rowdy mainspace. The trappings read like student theatre- […]
“That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Uncle Walt’s verse gets renewed life on stage in the millennial classic Dead Poets Society – an ode to nonconformity and self-expression in a world that vows to stamp out individualism in favor of conservative practicality. Despite its flaws, the film remains one […]
The first half, and probably two-thirds, of The Sewing Group is excruciatingly oblique. It opens on two women, clad in black mantles, sitting on bare wooden stools in a bare wooden room and sewing. These people are, according to the script, A (Jane Hazelgrove) and B (Sarah Niles). They sew and continue to, but before […]
Secrets of a Black Boy (Playing with Crayons/Theatre Passe Muraille) A constantly evolving mix of storytelling and narrative theatre, playwright Darren Anthony’s moving and evocative Secrets of a Black Boy brings five very different black men together for one last game of dominoes before their community centre closes. The play begins with a theatrical montage […]
Recounting the short but significant life of Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Scottish poet of World War One, It is Easy to Be Dead is a sombre take on the brutality of war. Told through a collection of letters and poetry, the play follows Sorley from his time at Cambridge to his studies in Germany before […]
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Rough couple of months. All of 2016, really; it’s kicking humanity’s ass and it’s hard to see any light in a tunnel that doesn’t look like it has an end. The news is a daily deluge of depression, social media’s awash with empty protest, and I keep googling […]
What I loved most about Yell Rebel’s Agency is its originality. I’ve never experienced a story of this sort before. A young women, Hannah (Eva Barrie), shows up at a travel agency in a former East Berlin neighbourhood determined to learn what really happened to her father after her family fled to West Berlin. After having […]
Theatre Parallax’s KATA, could be qualified as a modern dance version of a psychological thriller. The piece elicits strong feelings, though they are mostly of apprehension, revulsion, awe, and fear. In regards that the goal of the show was to drive these feelings out of the audience, it was a resounding success. The programme and press […]