It took about a hundred years for Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse François de Sade) to become a figure of great interest and even greater controversy. His sadistic nature (the expression sadism is derived from his name due to his writings and behaviour) and immoralitym completely unacceptable by any social standards, caused him imprisonment more often than not. He spent his last years of life incarcerated in Charenton asylum (Val-de-Marne, France), where he wrote and directed plays with its inmates as actors.

In the 20^th century, artists celebrated him as a founder of free expression in erotic literature; Guillaume Apollinaire even called him “the freest spirit that has yet existed.”

His writings, full of sexual fantasy combined with philosophy of pornography with an emphasis on violence, repel some and fascinate others to this day.

Sade’s life and philosophy inspired many, among them German writer Peter Weiss, who wrote the play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (shortened version “Marat-Sade” ) in 1963. The plot is set inCharenton asylum  in 1808, where Marquis de Sade directs a play about the death of the popular French Revolution leader Jean Paul Marat. Conceptualized as a play within a play, this sharp political theatre deals with abuse of power and the meaning of revolution. In the wake of  Artaud and Brecht vision of theatre, he uses the environment of chaos and madness to show human suffering and class struggle, as well as to question the role of the true revolution – should it change socity and where should the change come from: from the histrorical event itself of from ourselves? …

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In George F. Walker’s dark comedy “Moss Park,” Tina (Emma Slipp) and Bobby (Graeme McComb) are a young couple who fell in love, made love and, consequently, became parents as teenagers. It’s now three years later and, although they no longer live together, they still love each other. Now, they meet in Moss Park in Toronto to figure out whether there is a future in store for them, their three-year-old daughter, and – whoops- another one on the way. Yes, Emma is pregnant again, as a result of a night of passionate reconciliation between her and Bobby.

Walker puts all imaginable obstacles in their way. Not only are they as poor as church mice, but they also come from very problematic families. Emma is the third generation of immigrants whose dreams of a better life have been going to pieces ever since her grandfather came to the country.  Bobby grew up with an alcoholic father, who recently replaced drinking with smoking weed. As if that weren’t bad enough, it seems that at least half of his relations and friends have a criminal record. He is incapable of keeping any decent job more than a day, but has been proficient at committing petty crimes since his early teens. …

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Who are we? What is the purpose of our existence? These are questions many of us constantly ask ourselves. As such, they rank high above others on the priority list, whether they address pressing world issues, catastrophes of any proportion, or the very survival of anything that is not connected to us. That is exactly the story of the Young Lady in White. Photographed in the summer of 1932, and never developed due to the events that followed (the Nazis coming to power in 1933 and the

political changes they introduced), our protagonist is destined to live her life as a negative for 28,000 nights. The only company in her solitude and everlasting wait for her artist (who, she hopes, will come back to developed her) is the charming Chada – a cat that has never gotten further than sketch level. The negative girl and the sketch cat spend decades (from 1932 to 2009) in looking through the bathroom window at the world as it develops: atrocities during WWII, the total destruction brought on by the use of the atomic bomb, and victimized civilians in the post-war era. The girl doesn’t have much appreciation of the history that unfolds before eyes (except for the occasional ejaculation of surprise), but she listens to Chada, develops a strong companionship with him, and, at the end, destroys him for telling her an unwanted truth – that she is no more than an unknown negative, and that she will never be more than that. Finally, 10 years after the Berlin Wall fell, his prediction proved to be wrong: during the final clean-up of the area, a municipal engineer finds her in the darkroom and takes her with him. To be developed? Well, that is not the point of the story, which makes this ending of the play an artificial and rushed edition rather than a necessary ending statement.  …

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The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie is one of the longest running plays. It is based on a short story (published only in the short stories collection “Three Blind Mice”), which was inspired by the real-life case of the death of a boy, Dennis O’Neill who died in 1945, while in the foster care of a Shropshire farmer and his wife.

Like all Christie’s work, The Mousetrap has her signature all over it: unexpected twist and turns, a surprising choice of murderer and a full pallet of very realistic characters. The play is a typical ‘who done it’ mystery. It is set in the early 1950s, in the isolated Monkswell Manor run by the young, recently married couple Giles and Molly Ralston. The play takes place on a winter day with heavy snowfall, so that the isolation of the house is highlighted. At the time of the murder in the manor, all five guests have already arrived and settled quite comfortably, as well as a detective who came to investigate a murder committed the previous night in London. When one of the guests is killed, the detective starts interrogating the rest of the people. Anyone can be the guilty party and it is obvious that everybody is trying to hide something from the past.

There is a reoccurring sentence in Agatha Christie’s stories – the leitmotif which helps explain her work. As her popular character, Miss Marple often says, there is a lot of human nature in everyone. So really, although she is a mystery writer – her writing revolves around people; it is mostly character studies. In adaptation of her work to a different media (including theatre), there are two important things to remember: stick to the original time and place, and be sure to develop the characters well. …

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Photo.Victoria Salter.

They say we all have our demons to fight against. Of course, rarely does anybody believe in such creatures as  demons, ghosts, devils, products of someone’s imagination, like , CS Lewis’  for example. Still, who knows? After seeing 9th Hour Theatre Company’s version of CS Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” one begins to wonder.  But, let’s start from the beginning.

It all started on Sunday afternoon, in the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre’s  Studio space, where Lewis’ imaginative and philosophical narrative about good and evil, seen from the devil’s perspective and told through Screwtape’s Letters to his nephew Wormwood, came alive.

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