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 […]
Before we announce the winners of the 2013 My Theatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series. In Brandon Crone’s Turtleneck, John Fray played Roy- a terrifying, violent and controlling misogynist. In real life, it turns out he’s a totally charming and completely irreprehensible human being. In praise of his startling transformation, we’ve nominated […]
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 […]
Absence touches a part of our lives for which few of us want to confront until necessary. Psychologist Erik Erikson articulated his Psychosocial Stages over fifty years ago, but we have been struggling to live and die for centuries. At the end, we are faced with the eighth stage, a bitter reflection on our life […]
The Untitled Feminist Show, by Young Jean Lee, is an hour of beautiful and thought-provoking movement. It’s an eclectic mixture of elements sifted together so that trying to pull it apart into its constituent elements feels wrong, especially given the smoothness – or even gentleness – of the staged transitions. The music ranges from electro-pop to […]
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 […]