Ryan Pepper

Carleton’s Sock’n Buskin Theatre Company pull off delightfully funny “Much Ado About Nothing”

By Ryan Pepper | November 18, 2018

The latest play from Carleton University’s Sock ‘n’ Buskin Theatre Company is the Shakespeare comedy Much Ado About Nothing, set not in Renaissance Italy but in 1970s Ontario cottage country in a bid to explore Shakespeare’s more eternal themes and the balance of seriousness with plenty of frivolity and dance parties.

The play captures the 1970s feel in the colourful set, costuming, and music. Updating Shakespeare’s setting was a fine move on the part of director Olivia Botelho, and the choice of decade heightened the goofy comedy while taking little away from the plot (there were a few occasions when the upbeat disco soundtrack didn’t quite match the darker events of the play). …

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Chasing Champions brings to life a Black Canadian icon who should have never been forgotten

By Ryan Pepper | November 16, 2018

Chasing Champions: The Sam Langford Story by Nova Scotia playwright Jacob Sampson (who also stars) and directed by Ron Jenkins is very much a “best _____ you’ve never heard of story,” the tale of a young boxer who was never properly given his chance to be the champion of the world. The fact that the story must be viewed through a racial lens only adds to its strength and importance. …

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Silence at the NAC: the romantic life of a couple behind the invention of the telephone

By Ryan Pepper | October 20, 2018

Photo: Claus Anderson

Silence brings to the spotlight the romantic life of the husband and wife behind the invention of the telephone. The opening night of the 2018–2019 season found the National Arts Centre turning the spotlight on a Canadian icon and his wife, Alexander Graham and Mabel Hubbard Bell, in the play Silence. This Grand Theatre (London, ON) production, brought to life on the national stage by director and former NAC English Theatre Artistic Director Peter Hinton, eschews simple biography and hagiography to focus on the romance between Alec and Mabel, of their endearing courtship and often difficult, but always loving, marriage. …

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Le tigre bleu de l’Euphrate : a beautiful depiction of a conflicted Alexander the Great taking stock of his life at the height of a feverish delirium

By Ryan Pepper | October 18, 2018

Le tigre bleu de l’Euphrate is a solo show capturing the emotional, agonizing final night of Alexander the Great, as he lays dying of a fever.Written by Laurent Gaudé and brought to life in a beautiful performance by Emmanuel Schwartz, the performance is a monologue and meditation as the first man to make a serious effort at conquering the known world faces his own demise. Over the course of the hour and a half–long show, Alexander reflects upon both his mortality and immortality, slipping into despair as disease claims him, but finding solace in his military exploits that will make him as immortal as the soil beneath his feet.

Le tigre bleu isn’t simply a history lesson though. While it does spend some time recounting his campaigns in Persia, his founding of Alexandria, his battles in the Indus River Valley, and his life in Babylon, it is a much more introspective look at Alexander than offered in history books. We can’t know what Alexander was thinking in his final hours, so playwright Gaudé creates an Alexander grappling with guilt over the countless lives lost on his grand campaigns, but also one assured of his everlasting fame from those same battles that haunt him at the end of his life. …

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The Virgin Trial: a gritty political crime drama.

By Ryan Pepper | September 15, 2018

Kate Hennig’s The Virgin Trial is a must-see gritty political crime drama that upends expectations of innocence and victimhood

The Great Canadian Theatre Company’s production of The Virgin Trial by Canadian playwright Kate Hennig is a stunning gritty political crime drama that centers on a treason scandal in the young Queen Elizabeth I’s life that forces the audience to grapple with ideas of innocence and victimhood in a nuanced way. …

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Bear & Company’s Cymbeline in the park is an hilarious, fully enjoyable show for a nice summer night

By Ryan Pepper | July 12, 2018

While Shakespeare’s company probably never performed his plays in a park, Jacobean theatres were open-air, lit only by sunlight, and had no fancy lighting, sound, and set designs like modern theatre. Bear and Company’s performance of Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s later plays, does a lot to recreate that original Jacobean feel by staging an open-air show in various parks across the city. .

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s crazier plays, with a convoluted plot that’s hard to follow, and hard to believe could ever happen in real life. The plot is a grab-bag of earlier Shakespeare tropes. Kooky king a la King Lear? Check. Star-crossed lovers? Of course. Running off into the forest disguised as a boy? Yep. A conniving queen? Uh-huh. A lecherous womanizer? Certainly. The Roman army invades and are defeated a scene later. The plot is so absurd, in fact, that Cymbeline fell out of favour for centuries, and many critics still think that Shakespeare had just gotten bored. It is one of his final plays, after all. …

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This is Step One is a personal play for the #MeToo era

By Ryan Pepper | June 21, 2018

An emotional storytelling solo show, This is Step One tells a highly personal story of sexual assault and abuse, and a direct response to the Me Too movement. The story that Jess McAuley unweaves for an hour is disturbing but, unfortunately, not atypical. An updating iPhone kicks off the story, as Jess clicks the wrong button and uploads all her old pictures and texts from her old phone to the new one. Now older and having made it through an incredibly rough patch in her life, Jess has the courage to dive into her dark past, and she brings the audience along as we experience a brutal story of serial sexual assault, abuse, drug use, and depression and anxiety. …

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Red Bastard: Lie with Me is a buffoonish meditation on the rules of love, lies, and cheating

By Ryan Pepper | June 21, 2018

Red Bastard is an interactive show about love, lies, and lust. A show that’s more interactive than most, it also gets you to confess to some love-related secrets—or just lie. The titular Red Bastard is a bit of a crazy jester character, dressed in bulging red pyjamas and whiteface, and sermonizing on our affection towards lies and lying. That is, we like to lie, but we don’t like to be lied to. Early in the play, the Red Bastard—the beastly jester-like alter ego of performer Eric Davis—has the audience all stand up. As he lists off common lies, audience members who have told that lie must sit down. This is his icebreaker game, to get the audience into the mindset that we are all compulsive liars. Lying makes the world go around. …

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Canada 151 offers a hilarious and uniquely Millennial Canadian take on sketch comedy

By Ryan Pepper | June 19, 2018

I think it’s a fact that a lot of young people don’t always know how to feel about their home country. Canadians of all ages have a love-hate relationship with Canada, but maybe those of a younger generation feel it more. As social justice pushes forward, it becomes harder to uncritically enjoy the history, and current place, of a country that has treated, and continues to treat, many of its citizens horrendously. Everyone can find something to argue and be angry about, and more and more that dialogue is being commandeered by people with radical opinions. Young Canadians walk a tightrope. We want to criticize and dismantle the bad things in Canadian society, but many of us also want to celebrate and enjoy this country. …

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Brainteasing play 25 offers a puzzling meditation on being 25 that you’ll have to think about

By Ryan Pepper | June 19, 2018

Reviewed by Ryan Pepper

One of the more difficult plays at Fringe to understand, 25 is the type of work where you can see it with your friends, go out for drinks afterwards, and all reach a different conclusion to this puzzling play from Parisian theatre duo 1919. Superficially it’s about 25-year-olds, as all the characters—and you can debate how many there are—are all right in the mid-twenties. But 25 digs deeper, until it’s ultimate grappling with issues of how and why we create importance, and self-importance, in our lives. …

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