Photo: Barb Gray

On one level, GCTC’s sterling production of Angel Square might seem to offer no more than a series of impressions of a particularly beguiling kind.

But they’re impressions that beautifully evoke another time and place — Lowertown Ottawa in the 1940s. And out of them there emerges a delightful stage work of genuine shape and substance.

It’s through the prism of an observant youngster named Tommy that these moments unfold. Even if we weren’t actually there ourselves, we find ourselves engulfed in his childhood world. And its components resonate with us today.

It’s a world of Woolworth stores — remember them? — with creaking wooden floors. Of Ottawa’s majestic Union Station, now an underused government conference centre, but in this production exerting a ghostly remembrance of things past, courtesy of designer Jock Munro.

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Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 5 2015. Photographer, Vartanova

Ottawa’s Lowertown could be a rough place for 12-year-olds in the mid-1940s. Racism, pitched battles with other kids, nasty teachers: such hurdles sometimes made life something to be survived more than celebrated. But while Angel Square, Janet Irwin’s loving and vibrant stage adaptation of Brian K. Doyle’s 1984 novel of the same name, sharply limns the rough side of life, it also excites our envy of those urban kids of long ago – their freedom, their resilience, their sense of place and community.

Just as importantly, the family-friendly show makes us appreciate anew Doyle’s depiction of the rich imaginative life of Tommy, the story’s young hero. Fantasizing himself to be Lamont Cranston, AKA the crime-fighting Shadow of 1930s and ‘40s radio drama and print fame, Tommy sets out to solve the mystery of who badly beat the father of his best friend, Sammy Rosenberg. That quest in the days leading up to Christmas, 1945 serves as backbone to a fond recreation of life in a now-vanished Ottawa: the original Ritchie Feed & Seed Store on York Street (a Ritchie bag is key to solving the mystery); the squeaky floored Woolworth’s and the more upscale Freimans department store on Rideau Street; the vast, echoing Union Station, now the Government Conference Centre.

Irwin, who also directs, has cast just four adult actors to recreate

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Photo: Barb Gray

Crossing Angel Square in Lowertown Ottawa may have been risky in the 1940s, but, as recalled by Brian Doyle in his 1984 novel and adapted for the stage by Janet Irwin, it was also a place of warm friendships and special connections.

As adapted and directed by Irwin, this delightful dramatization, depicting the daily life of Tommy a.k.a. The Shadow, his friends, enemies and assorted adults, is anchored by solving the mystery of who attacked his best friend’s father. Honest in its descriptions of rampant racism and extreme poverty, Angel Square never loses its innocence, charm and puckish humour.

Enhanced by Jock Munro’s fine visuals, the set not only evokes a radio of the era but also serves as the focal point for projections of Ottawa landmarks and silhouettes in action.

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