Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia has been called one of the finest plays by a contemporary playwright; I would have to agree. The play offers a juxtaposition between a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century country house and the present day. The characters have delightful interplay through the props and general atmosphere in the English country house, Sidley Park. This […]
Playwrights want to be profound. One of the main reasons that we go to the theater is to experience drama so palpable that we become engaged enough to take in complex philosophical ideas and unique perspectives on the human experience. So, it makes sense that so many playwrights try to fill every line of dialogue […]
There are two sides to assessing pretty much any contemporary theatre piece- there’s the play, and there’s this production of it. With the current Canadian Stage production of Nina Raine’s Tribes, this line becomes quite blurry. This is the Canadian premiere of a fairly young and wildly lauded text so one gets the sense that […]
Soulpepper’s 2014 season opener has a cast of great talents. The massive ensemble makes use of the Academy’s rising stars and the bench-depth at Soulpepper is so impressive that they’ve got the likes of Jeff Lillico and Evan Buliung playing bit parts and waitstaff (actually, small part though it is, Buliung’s gentle Austrian workingman is […]
The Footlight Club started the New Year on the right foot with their January/February production of Craig Lucas’s brisk dark comedy, Reckless. The story revolves around Rachel Fitsimmons (Jenn Bean), a cheerful, talkative housewife who finds herself on the run on Christmas Eve, forced to live various new lives after being informed by her husband […]
The Children’s Hour is a Crucible-like story about the devastating effects of an angry young woman’s lives on those around her. In this 1934 drama, it is her two schoolmistresses Karen and Martha (played by Kathleen Pollard and Marisa King) who suffer most from the girl’s actions and who lose everything as a result of her […]
The Coyote Collective presented Labour at the Passe Muraille Backspace last week. The show, written by Eric and Ryan Welch, attempted to represent the monotony, loneliness and despair that can come with the routines of manual labour. To establish the scene in the warehouse, the collective used repeated physical movements and the sound of a […]
In many ways Metamorphosis, based on the novel by Franz Kafka and adapted for stage by David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson, is a play about denial. “We live ordinary lives” claims Lucy Samsa (Edda Arnljótsdóttir) when the employer of her son drops by demanding to know why Gregor Samsa (Björn Thors) is late for work. […]