Haunted Legacy

Canadian theatre has always captured the public’s imagination, both domestically and abroad, far less than Canadian literature and music has. By the 1970s, artists such as Joni Mitchell, Burton Cummings and Leonard Cohen were already successful at home and around the world. At the same time, Canadian theatre was still in its infant stages. Theatre history texts cite Theatre Passe Muraille’s collective creation The Farm Show and David French’s coming-of-age tale Leaving Home, both from 1972, as the two seminal works of Canadian theatre. While success rates in Canadian arts and culture have always been a contentious topic, it is at least clear that the particularly local flavour of these plays was at least one factor that barred their export.

However, in recent years, this trend has changed. The productions of Robert Lepage’s Quebec-based company Ex Machina developed an international audience in the mid 1990s. Several years later, plays by the likes...