“I admire a director with a strong aesthetic and conceptual sense of a piece. One who isn’t afraid to really put his fingerprints all over a production. Strong artists are always needed,” Caroline Cave’s voice pushes through my crackly mobile phone connection as strong and dry as sunlight, “and this is a really strong artistic team.”
The set of the NAC’s new production of Macbeth is elegantly sparse. In the opening scenes we’re faced with 10 inviting chairs, all set in a perfect line with each other, spaced evenly, divided into equal groups and placed under solid rectangles of light. The natural and divine world is in order. But soldiers violently and suddenly overturn select chairs and nature starts to spiral further out of alignment as chairs appear in more haphazard and scattered places.
Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air is almost too good So I have a problem this week. Late Nights on Air landed in my lap about three weeks ago. And it sat on my desk, waiting patiently with a tinge of desperation, like someone rendezvousing with a new lover. I no sooner…
It’s finally time to see what the GCTC can do inside its new home It’s a simple thing to say: There is a magic to beginnings, an insistent tug of the spirit like a great inrushing of breath. It fills you to think about witnessing things growing, changing, evolving, and that the immediate present translates…
Lisey must suffer Stephen King’s latest almost a theological treatise Stephen King is probably the most religious writer I can think of right now. Don’t misunderstand – I don’t mean religious in the sense of an organized and ritualized church, but simply that his writing embodies many of the most clear and pertinent aspects of…
Ottawa’s small press Chaudiere delivers as good or better At a reading, I once watched an author bring the microphone to his lips and say, “Book awards are the new book reviews.” Not quite up to Oscar Wilde standards, but with a bottle in my hand it seemed to be graced with a beery concinnity.…