Electricity: Macbeth at the Stratford Festival

Brigit Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, and Lanise Antoine Shelley in Macbeth at the Stratford Festival. (Photo: David Hou)

For me, the first measure of a Macbeth is the witches. The “weird sisters,” as they call themselves, are can’t-miss characters: They are central to Macbeth’s story, their lines are full of memorable poetry – people who have never seen the Scottish play know “Double, double toil and trouble” – chanting and prophesying. Actresses must love playing these parts. (I’ve occasionally seen them played by men, but it’s not common; and “weird siblings” doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

The witches in the Stratford Festival’s Macbeth – Brigit Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Lanise Antoine Shelley – are excellent, gruesome and dark and scary, and their reading of Shakespeare’s macabre verses is outstanding. The witch-scene staging, by the festival’s Artistic Director, Antoni Cimolino, is first-rate. The cauldron scene, in particular, is easily the best I’ve seen, and the witches’ disappearance at the end of it is an actual coup de théâtre. Macbeth’s “Where are they? Gone?” has never been so apropos.

To Be: The Stratford Festival's Hamlet

Some people say William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is his best play. Some say it is the best play in the English language. Personally, I’d lean toward the latter. The Bard’s great tragedy has it all, wrapped in one poetic, dramatic package: politics, family and political intrigue, jealousy, revenge, incest, madness, a ghost – all are integral parts of the work. Hamlet also contains several meaty, challenging roles, most especially the protagonist and title character, which may be the most demanding part in theatre, and is certainly one against which great actors define themselves. And whatever else you say about it, Hamlet is undeniably the most quoted work in the English language, and includes the single most quoted line: “To be or not to be.” The text is extraordinary. It seems as though every other line has entered our everyday language, in whole or in part: “To thine own self be true”; “To sleep, perchance to dream”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “Sweets to the sweet”; “Good-night, sweet prince”; “The lady doth protest too much”; “The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape”; and, of course, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The list is nearly endless.

Heroes and Villains: Philip Kerr's The Lady From Zagreb, Donna Leon's Falling in Love and Steve Burrows' A Siege of Bitterns

Philip Kerr’s The Lady from Zagreb (Putnam) opens on the French Riviera, in 1956. But that’s just prologue; the story proper begins in the summer of 1942, in Berlin. Bernie Gunther, a captain in the SD (the Nazi security service, or Sicherheitdienst) has been assigned to the Berlin police, investigating homicides and other serious crimes. But Bernie, despite his barely veiled cynicism and smart mouth, has shown a useful talent for delicate inquiries and judicious solutions on behalf of his Nazi masters. Indeed, he has just returned from Prague, where he solved a murder at the villa of the late SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the German security services, even as an assassination plot unfolded against Heydrich.

Back in Berlin, Bernie finds himself under the direct command of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, also head of Germany’s gigantic UFA film studios, who has a personal assignment for him: track down the missing father of Croatian-German actress Dalia Dresner (Goebbels, a notorious womanizer, calls her “Germany’s Garbo”), neé Sofia Branković. Bernie falls hard for the beautiful Dalia, who returns his feelings, and sets off into the chaos of wartime Yugoslavia to find her missing parent. The passages set in war-torn Croatia are bone-chilling, not just because of the German SS troops, who routinely shoot first and ask questions later, but more especially because of the ultra-nationalist Ustaše militia, allies of the Nazis but unpredictably and prodigiously vicious. It is among these barely sane irregulars that Bernie finds Dalia’s father, once a priest, now a militia leader known as Colonel Dragan, famous for the speed with which he can slash Serbian necks. Goebbels and Bernie agree to lie to Dalia, telling the screen star that her father is dead.

Between the Covers: Joakim Zander’s The Swimmer, Nele Neuhaus’s The Ice Queen and Laura Lippman’s Hush Hush

The Swimmer (HarperCollins), Swedish author Joakim Zander’s first novel, is a lightning-quick page-turner with sparse, evocative language (courtesy of translator Elizabeth Clark Wessel) and a terrific cast of characters. The novel opens in Damascus, in the summer of 1980. It’s blisteringly hot. An unnamed CIA agent is holed up with the woman he loves and their infant daughter. He is waiting for the right moment to tell her that he must leave Syria, and her and their child. But the baby is feverish, and before he can leave, the woman takes his keys and heads out to find medicine. His car – the car in which he was about to escape, containing money and his next identity – explodes. The explosion is “awful, majestic. It’s a whole battle compressed into one moment.” UA spends the rest of his life trying to find out exactly who placed the bomb, and why. We next meet Klara Waldéen, the young Swedish aide to a European Union parliamentarian in Brussels, and George Lööw, an ambitious and unscrupulous lobbyist working with a giant PR firm, also in Brussels. At the behest of his über-powerful boss, George is about to take on a mysterious new client. It’s gratifying to be sought-after, George thinks, but he’s uneasy because he can’t find out anything about that client. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Shammosh, an Uppsala-based academic and an old friend of Klara’s, is in Brussels taking part in a seminar on Middle East affairs. When he comes into possession of information about bad U.S. behaviour in Iraq and Afghanistan, he also runs into an American hit-team determined to recover that information. He and Klara are pursued in Brussels and Paris, and eventually to a Christmas Eve shootout on a tiny island in the Swedish Archipelago. This book – all crisp dialogue and fast action – is outstanding. Stieg Larsson may be dead, and Henning Mankell has retired Kurt Wallander, but the Swedish thriller is in good hands.

Representation: Disabled Theater at Harbourfront's World Stage

At the beginning of Disabled Theater, which is playing at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre as part of Harbourfront’s World Stage, the 11 members of the cast enter one at a time and stand centre-stage, in silence, for one minute. Then they exit and the next cast member comes out. That’s well over 11-plus minutes of silence, which can be pretty challenging for an audience, and also for the cast members. But Jérôme Bel, a Swiss director and choreographer living in Paris, is not afraid of a challenge. (Even the show’s title is somewhat controversial, as became clear in a pre-show chat session, in which one person drew applause when she objected to the term “disabled” as inherently divisive and demeaning.) In this work, a co-production with Zurich-based Theatre HORA, is designed to present people who “are not represented in the public sphere,” Bel says in the program notes. “If one is not represented, one doesn’t exist. And representation is my job.”

Looking for Clues: The Whites, Die Again and The Skeleton Road

The first thing to say about The Whites (Henry Holt) is that it is by “Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.” Now, Richard Price is a long-time and much respected writer of crime fiction (Clockers, Freedomland, Lush Life) and film scripts (Sea of Love, Mad Dog and Glory, Shaft, The Wire, the upcoming Child 44). So why Harry Brandt? Authors usually use pseudonyms not so much a disguise as an indication that the book is not like his or her other works, that there is a substantial change in style or substance. There is no such differentiation in Richard Price/Harry Brandt. Both write gritty urban thrillers, police procedurals with high-octane plots, infused with street smarts and salty language. In The Whites, Detective Sergeant Billy Graves is in charge of the Night Watch, a ragtag group of cops who respond to every major crime committed in Manhattan between 1 and 8 a.m. Their job is to secure the crime scene, canvas witnesses and then turn the whole thing over to the day shift. Graves had been tarred by an incident 18 years before, in which he accidentally shot a 10-year-old. Now, after years of nowhere postings, he is perfectly content with his overnight job. He runs his own unit, and he’s more or less free to mind his two sons during the day while his wife, Carmen, works as an emergency-room nurse. So when his squad is called out to Penn Station at 4 a.m. to investigate a stabbing, it’s routine. But the identity of the victim is not routine. He is Jeffrey Bannion, suspect in the brutal murder of a 12-year-old boy in the 1990s, when Graves was a member of the Wild Geese, an elite anti-crime unit not entirely averse to dealing out rough justice. Bannion is the obsession of John Pavlicek, a retired member of the Geese. The cop slang for the object of this obsession is a “White”; all the WGs, including Graves, have one. Not surprisingly, it occurs to Graves that Pavlicek could have knifed Bannion, but the former cop alibis out. Graves keeps poking around, however, and discovers that the Whites of other WGs have died suspiciously. Meanwhile, in a subplot that could support another novel, a vengeful cop, one with a 20-year-old reason to want bloody revenge, is stalking Graves’ wife. This is a harrowing read from beginning to end, enlivened by slick dialogue and a rough-and-ready view of both cops and the mean streets they inhabit.

Two-Hander Text: Twisted at the Factory Theatre

Photo by Racheal McCaig

If it needed proving that Canadian culture no longer revolves around wilderness, forests and the snow-covered North, the gritty urban drama Twisted would be the proof. This two-hander from playwrights Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman (Scratch, Sudden Death) and Joseph Jomo Pierre (Who Knew Grannie, Shakespeare’s Nigga) is set in the heart of darkest Toronto, in the seldom-seen space populated by addicts, dealers and sex-trade workers. The show is said to be a reworking of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, but that seems like a bit of a reach. It’s true that the two main characters are named Nancy (Susanna Fournier) and Oliver (Ngabo Nabea), and that other characters, unseen, are named Sikes and Dodger. But that recycling of names is about as far as the similarities go. Furthermore, and more significantly, there is no redemptive plot line in Twisted, no kindly Mr. Brownlow coming to the rescue.

This Nancy and Oliver are both pretty much doomed. Nancy is a 23-year-old webcam stripper (known online as NasstyFresh), working for the digital pimp Sikes and abusing Oxycontin, also known as “hillbilly heroin.” We learn of her loveless childhood in small-town Ontario through a series of angry, rancorous monologues on such subjects as school-yard bullies, playground design and Niagara Falls, and through text messages projected on the stage’s backdrop. These texts are mostly exchanged with 17-year-old Oliver – she calls him Ollie, he calls her Lady Porcelain – a product of Ontario’s foster-child system. Oliver’s monologues are something altogether different, delivered in hip-hop rhythms and poetic language, also angry and bitter, but without the drug sensibility. We learn of his upbringing in foster care and the maternal woman, “Big Bird” – he gives everyone nicknames, Nancy has told us – who raised him. Nancy is Sikes’ “bottom girl,” charged with running the other women in his stable of strippers. As such, one of her jobs is to meet the young girls when they arrive in Toronto, enticed by Sikes’ seductive descriptions of big-city life. She is to meet Rose at Dundas Square – “the only part of the city that made sense: concrete and pretense” – and turn her out into the sex-trade world. But in a development that turns the story sharply, Nancy has determined that she can’t go through with Sikes’ plan. She decides that Rose is “someone to save,” and enlists Ollie in a plan to set the youngster free: Nancy introduces Rose to him and he drives her out of the city to Big Bird’s place, where she will be safe and out of harm’s way. Afterward, Nancy and Ollie will flee the city, and Sikes. 

Looking for Clues: Three New Mysteries by Alan Bradley,Thomas Perry and Becky Masterman

Fans of Canadian writer Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels – and I freely confess I am one of them – will remember that at the end of The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, the sixth in the series, 11-year-old heroine Flavia – poison aficionado, investigator extraordinaire – discovered that her late mother and her very much alive Aunt Felicity, were members of a shadowy group of secret agents known as the Nide. And furthermore, that she, Flavia, was destined to join them. To further this end, Flavia is sent – is “banished” for her sins, she feels – to Toronto, to enroll in Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, the private school her mother attended as a girl. As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Delacorte), Bradley’s seventh Flavia novel, chronicles our precocious preteen protagonist’s adventures in Canada. And you know there will be adventures. Sure enough, on Flavia’s first day at Miss Bodycote’s, a wrapped and mummified body falls out of the chimney into her room, ending up right at her feet. (Flavia has long demonstrated a world-class aptitude for finding dead bodies.) The Toronto police take charge of the body, of course, but that doesn’t stop Flavia from pursuing the identity of the victim and, of course, the murderer. And while she’s at it, she also looks into the ghost said to haunt Miss Bodycote’s and the rumours about girls disappearing over the years. Of course, she must also attend classes – including, much to her delight, a chemistry course taught by a woman acquitted of murder by poison – negotiate girls-boarding-school culture, investigate the school’s staff, and, not incidentally, deal with her training in the tradecraft of spying. It’s a charming jumble of clues, false trails and surprises, all narrated in Flavia’s droll, amusing voice. If I have a cavil, it’s that I miss the village of Bishop’s Lacey and its many delightful characters, the rambling, crumbling de Luce mansion Buckshaw, Flavia’s wicked older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, faithful family retainers Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, and even Flavia’s sturdy, reliable bicycle, Gladys. So frankly, I was delighted to find that, after solving the many mysteries of Miss Bodycote’s (no spoiler), Flavia is headed back to England.

Sleuthing in the Holidays: The Burning Room, Thin Air and Murder on the Île Sordou: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal Mystery

In Michael Connelly's latest, The Burning Room (Little, Brown and Company), Los Angeles Police Department detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch is still attached to the Open-Unsolved Unit, which is usually tasked with solving cold crimes from many years before. But in this case, the victim, a one-time mariachi musician, has just died. Ten years before, a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting had hit him. It cost him his legs and lodged next to his spine, from where it could not be safely removed, taking a decade to kill him. Bosch and his brand-new partner, newly appointed detective Lucia Soto, are assigned the case. But when the bullet is finally removed from his body, it suddenly becomes clear that the victim was shot with a hunting rifle, making it extremely unlikely they’re dealing with a drive-by gone awry. Starting from scratch on a 10-year-old case is difficult enough, but Bosch is not thrilled with his new partner, who was the heroine of a shoot-out in the street, but has no experience as a detective, let alone in homicide. Bosch’s boss makes it clear that the senior detective should pass along his knowledge and skills. But Bosch soon finds that Soto has an agenda of her own: She is determined to solve a 20-year-old arson case in which five of her friends died. Bosch agrees to help her, though their current case must come first. It’s a treat – as it always is in a Harry Bosch novel – to watch the veteran detective play the system using his vast network of informants, friends and former colleagues to overcome the resistance of the police bureaucracy and the outright hostility of his bosses. The detectives’ two investigations eventually step on some prominent toes, and they are told to back off, but you know they won’t. And they don’t.

Sleuths: Peter Robinson's Abattoir Blues, John Sandford's Deadline and Deborah Crombie's To Dwell In Darkness

One of the things I like best about Peter Robinson’s Yorkshire-based series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is its terrific ensemble cast, especially the ambitious and troubled DI Annie Cabbot (Banks’s on-again, off-again lover) and tall, beautiful Jamaican immigrant DS Winsome Jackman. Even such relatively minor regular characters as DCs Dougal Wilson and Gerry Masterson, Area Commander Catherine Gervaise, and London DCS Richard (Dirty Dick) Burgess – not to mention the various bad guys, witnesses and victims – are well drawn and utterly believable. As Abattoir Blues opens, army veteran Terry Gilchrist’s dog apparently discovers a large bloodstain – and what appears to be brain matter – in the hangar of a long-abandoned airfield. Meanwhile, Cabbot and Wilson are investigating the case of a stolen tractor, which Cabbot maintains is no job for the Homicide and Major Crimes unit. But as Wilson points out, the new police commissioner thinks rural crime is major. Also, it is a very expensive tractor. As those two get on with their investigation, Jackman heads for the hangar to check out the bloodstain. Cabbot and Wilson end up seeking two young men who may be connected to the tractor-theft, and who are now missing. Jackman and Banks’s inquiries soon cross paths with Cabbot and Wilson’s, especially when a horrible truck accident during a sudden snowstorm produces a particularly grisly discovery. The investigation takes Banks and his team all over the countryside, but also into the worlds of high finance, hobby farming, meat rendering, smuggling, property development and, as unlikely as it sounds, spelunking. And while all that is going on, we see some serious interest developing between Winsome and former soldier Gilchrist. Keep an eye on them in future novels.

A Delicious Confection: Soulpepper's Production of Parfumerie

Patricia Fagen & Oliver Dennis in Parfumerie (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

The first thing you notice about Soulpepper Theatre’s delightful production of Parfumerie, Miklos Laszlo’s 1937 comedy, is that it is beautiful. Ken MacDonald’s set is a delicious confection of curves and swirls, in ivory and deep pink, setting off Dana Osborne’s rich and evocative costumes. The parfumerie of the title is Hammerschmidt and Company, purveyors of scents, lotions and makeup, as well as various other accoutrements, accessories and gift items (even the items for sale, sprinkled all over the set, are attractive). It is Budapest, in the 1930s, but it could be almost any place or era. This is a tale almost Shakespearean in its elements, a story of love and desire, jealousy and ambition. And Christmas, of course. Mustn’t forget Christmas.

Three Mysteries: John Sandford's Storm Front, Sue Grafton's W is for Wasted and Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In

While reading Storm Front (Putnam, 376 pages, $29.50), John Sandford’s seventh Virgil Flowers crime novel – there are 23 Prey novels and four in the Kidd and LuEllen series – I couldn’t help thinking of the term “MacGuffin,” popularized in the 1930s by Alfred Hitchcock, which can be loosely defined as the plot element that motivates a story’s characters. The "MacGuffin" in this novel is a stele, a fragment of a monument from Middle East antiquity, with inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics and some form of primitive Hebrew. The novel opens with the piece of stone, a foot long by 10 or so inches across, being stolen by the archaeologist who discovered it, who then smuggles the fragment out of Israel and into the United States, specifically to Mankato, Minnesota. Flowers, an agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is in pursuit of fraudulent barn-wood dealer Florence “Ma” Nobles, a frisky thirty-something single mother of five “intra-ethnic fatherless boys.” Ma denies Virgil’s accusation, and is also, for her part, pursuing Virgil: " ‘Instead of talking about barn lumber we oughta talk about how to scratch my itch,’ Ma said, pushing out her lower lip. ‘Here it is July and I ain't been laid since March the eighteenth. You're just the boy to get ’er done, Virgie.’ ”

Greek Tragedy - Canadian Style: Soulpepper's Farther West

Soulpepper's production of Farther West (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

John Murrell has a long-established and fully justified reputation as a playwright who creates good roles for women and places them in well constructed works based on historical Canadian subjects. So it makes perfect sense that he would create a play about Canadian prostitutes in the 19th century. Farther West, first produced in 1982 (directed by Robin Phillips and starring Martha Henry) and now running at Soulpepper’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts until Nov. 9, won Murrell a second Chalmers Award, the first coming for 1977’s Waiting for the Parade. It is the story of May Buchanan, a prostitute who worked her way from small-town Ontario westward across Canada in the 1870s and ’80s. She started at 14, on the advice of her father, who had just found her having sex with a much older neighbour: “You can’t carry on like that here, girl. You better move on. Better start moving, farther west.”

Director Diana Leblanc’s production is striking, starting even before the opening: a naked couple is entwined on-stage as the audience takes its seats. No question, nudity is powerful, and the tableau leads convincingly and appropriately into the play proper. Astrid Janson’s set, though simple – a painted scrim backdrop, a sloped platform – is made striking by Graeme Thomson’s lighting, and it should be noted that a river, or rather a creek, runs through it. Janson’s costumes are grittily realistic, nicely matching the tone of the first act, at least. The scenes in Vancouver switch to a sort of nasty melodrama that takes us into a somewhat over-the-top ending.

Redux: The Mirvish Production's Les Misérables

There are several interesting story lines to Mirvish Productions’ revival of the grand musical Les Misérables, which opened last week at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre. First there is the fact that it has been rethought and reconfigured from its previous incarnations, in Toronto and elsewhere, by directors Laurence Connor and James Powell, and designer Matt Kinley. Then there is the return to Toronto of the leading man, Ramin Karimloo, raised in Peterborough and Richmond Hill, who went to England to pursue a career in musical theatre, and who eventually starred in London’s West End with the title role in Phantom of the Opera. And of course there is the musical’s story itself, inspired by Victor Hugo’s epic novel, a tale encompassing love, revenge, revolution, social justice, politics, poverty, crime and punishment, all delivered by an enormous – and in this case enormously talented – cast of characters. The redesign, said to be inspired by Hugo’s own illustrations for the novel, is wonderful. In the magic-box set, a variety of “locations” – homes, street scenes, an inn, a cathedral and assorted city buildings, as well as the famous barricade and the eerie sewers of Paris – are established with intricate precision, all supplemented and loaned detail by large-scale back projections.

Tick, Tick … BOOM! at Toronto’s Studio Theatre

Parris Greaves, Laura Mae Nason, and Ken Chamberland in Tick, Tick ... BOOM! (Photo by Vincent Perri)

First things first. The production of Tick, Tick … BOOM! currently playing at the Studio Theatre of the Toronto Centre for the Arts is excellent: fast-paced, funny, energetic, well-staged, well-performed and well-sung. It’s a terrific way to spend an evening.

In broad outline, the story of Tick, Tick … BOOM! is kind of old hat: Young artist suffers for his art, agonizes over his future and his talent – is it all worthwhile? – and then, despite all the obstacles, has a great success. What gives this small musical its special frisson, however, is that it’s pretty much autobiographical, and that the show’s creator, Jonathan Larson, is better known as the originator of Rent, the sensational, multi-award-winning rock musical (loosely based on Puccini’s La Bohème) that ran on Broadway for more than a decade, toured all over the world, and spawned a pretty good movie musical.

Lee Child's Never Go Back: Jack Reacher Returns

Never Go Back, Lee Child’s 18th Jack Reacher novel, is just like its predecessors, at least in the broad strokes: Our wandering hero finds himself in deep trouble, meets good people and bad, helps the good and kicks ass on the bad. What is noteworthy about this one for the many, many fans of Child’s thrillers is that Reacher finally makes contact with Major Susan Turner, new head of the 110th MP Special Unit, Reacher’s old command. In the earlier novel 61 Hours, Turner was no more than an attractive voice on the telephone, a voice Reacher describes as "warm, a little husky, a little breathy, a little intimate," and whom he was determined to meet in person.

But the meeting is not what Reacher expected. After making his way from South Dakota to the Virginia headquarters of the 110th, as close to a home as Reacher has ever had – there is a legendary dent in his old desk, where he once bounced his commanding officer’s head – Reacher finds someone else in the unit commander’s office, a nasty piece of work named Lt. Col. Morgan. Reacher receives two pieces of bad news: a 16-year-old incident has somehow resulted in a murder complaint against him, and he is the subject of a paternity suit from a woman he’s never heard of. Furthermore, Susan Turner has been charged with taking a $100,000 bribe, arrested and jailed. 

Children of the Revolution: DCI Banks Continues to Please

It probably no longer needs to be said that Peter Robinson is one of the premier writers of detective fiction in the English language, right up there with Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, P.D. James and any other crime novelist that you might care to name. The facts speak for themselves: Children of the Revolution (McClelland & Stewart) is Robinson’s 21st novel starring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, apart from five other standalone works of fiction. His awards and prizes, in several countries, are numerous. And besides all that, there is the BBC series based on his novels (titled, unimaginatively, DCI Banks, but brilliantly cast with veteran actor Stephen Tompkinson in the title role), which Robinson aficionados will be pleased to hear has been renewed for a third season.

In this novel, DCI Banks is called out to a cold, damp death, a man broken and battered on an abandoned railway line 30 metres below an isolated footbridge. He could be a suicide or he could have been pushed over the wall of the overpass, or he could have been beaten and thrown off the bridge. The victim, named Gavin Miller, is a local man, down on his luck and a bit of a loner, though not altogether unfriendly. There is, however, one highly unusual thing about Miller’s death: He was carrying an envelope with £5,000 in new £50 notes in it. As Detective Sergeant Winsome Jackman says, “Not something you’d need for a walk in the woods.” (page 9)

Eloquence: Othello and The Merchant of Venice at Stratford

Othello at Stratford

It might not be the most important thing about the Stratford Festival’s Othello, but it must be said: It’s a beautiful production. Designer Julie Fox and lighting designer Michael Walton – and, of course, director Chris Abraham – have collaborated on a visually stunning set, an apparently simple arrangement of large, blood-red vertical panels, enclosing a raked, diamond-shaped rotating and tilting stage. The three elements – stage, panels and lighting – prove remarkably flexible and evocative.

More important? The excellent performances of the three leads, Bethany Jillard as Desdemona, Graham Abbey as Iago and, especially, Dion Johnstone in the title role. These are not easy parts, for a variety of reasons, but the Stratford cast carries them off with skill and panache.

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam: A Masterly Conclusion to her Trilogy

Margaret Atwood's new novel MaddAddam has just been published (Photo by Chris Young)

You may remember that Oryx and Crake, the first novel in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, is narrated by Snowman, a survivor – he thinks he may be the only human survivor – of the gruesome plague that has recently swept the Earth, leaving it deserted and ruined, inhabited by giant pigoons and wolvogs.

Snowman, who in the pre-Flood days was named Jimmy, tells the stories of Oryx, his great love, and Crake, his best friend. He interacts with the Children of Crake, bio-engineered, peaceable humanoids who lead simplified lives, don’t eat meat and have never felt greed (or clothing). He also recounts the events leading up to the pandemic, when the world was ruled by corporations and the population was divided into the privileged elite, corporate employees (and managers and scientists) who lived in strong-walled Compounds, and everyone else, the inhabitants of the pleeblands, the slums and suburbs outside the Compounds. The Corporate Security Corps, or CorpSeCorps, was the all-purpose police force, army and intelligence service. 

Delightfully Fluffy: Blithe Spirit at Stratford

Susie Burnett as Edith and Seana McKenna as Madame Arcati (Photo by David Hou)

I had planned to skip the Stratford Theatre Festival’s Blithe Spirit. It seemed to me like a piece of fluff, and there were so many “serious,” “worthy” plays to be seen at the festival. But I had a space in the schedule, and Noël Coward’s 1941 screwball farce was there, so off I went. As you might expect, it was a great decision, however inadvertent. Blithe Spirit is fluffy, but it’s delightful fluff, directed by Brian Bedford with a sure hand, performed with comic panache by a terrific cast, and all of it set in Simon Higlett’s gorgeous jewel of a set. My apologies to Mr. Bedford. I should have known better.