Theatre Rusticle’s Dinner at Seven-Thirty is a richly poetic story of personal torment playing at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times

There comes a point in each of our lives when we reflect back on our individual histories and ask ourselves, “What have you become?” Theatre Rusticle’s current production, Dinner at Seven-Thirty, is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s iconic 1931 piece, The Waves. In this novel, we are introduced to a group of six childhood friends who have all entered adulthood, and now reminisce about the various moments that have defined each of their lives thus far.

Filled with poignant social commentaries and heart-warming depictions of personal torment, Dinner at Seven-Thirty is a wonderfully poetic production which further expands on the cannon of Woolf’s masterpiece as, now older and wiser, the six friends share new experiences.

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The Killing Game is an absurd and bizarre dark comedy playing at Toronto’s Annex Theatre in time for Halloween

‘Ring Around the Rosie’ was a song we all sang as kids and then learned, years later, the true meaning behind the nursery tune – the black plague. The juxtaposition of a lilting kids’ song to deliver a lesson of history’s most devastating pandemic is greatly exaggerated in an avant-garde and absurdist way in Eugene Ionesco’s The Killing Game presented by Art & Lies Productions.

Numerous single act vaudevillian skits performed with as much outlandish kitsch and dazzling jazz handed grandeur as the production’s team of 18 actors can muster make up the evening’s two hour show. In the style of absurdist theatre with a nod to theatre of the macabre, The Killing Game, playing at the Annex Theatre,  is a perfect precursor to Halloween festivities.

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Stunning performances fill Soulpepper Theatre’s The Norman Conquests playing at Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts

At first blush, The Norman Conquests (playing at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts) would be easy to confuse with any number of tacky 1970s British sex farces;  the sort of play in which horny middle-aged men chase scantily-dressed women in and out of constantly-slamming doors while dodging various wives, ministers, tax inspectors, etc.

Ayckbourn’s script is a child of this genre: the philandering husband, the impotent cuckold, the ice queen and the frustrated virgin all make their mandatory appearances, complete with a furtive shag on a truly appalling hearthrug.

But while they’re filled to the brim with sex and raunch, bedroom farces lack intimacy: we laugh at the jiggle and wiggle and the slap and the tickle, but that’s as good as it gets. People over thirty having sex, haw-haw-haw.

What sets Conquests apart from its seamy brethren is in escaping this inevitable descent into laughing at middle-aged people fucking; in finding clever and innovative places to insert moments of insight, of love, of trust and of intimate feeling. Conquests is a clever, hilarious, unflinching and playful adventure through the shadows and crannies of adulthood, and more than lives up to its billing as one of Ayckbourn’s greatest–and most challenging–projects.

Put it in the hands of Soulpepper, and you know you’re in for a real treat.

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