Coffee-Table Notes

Evalyn Parry and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory were worlds apart before they joined forces to create Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools. Their fusion of words, song and dance forms part of Edinburgh International Festival’s You Are Here season of global performance work.   Parry makes theatre and writes and performs songs in urban inner city Toronto, where she grew up and where she is now artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Bathory, meanwhile, is an indigenous Greenlandic performance artist, storyteller and writer based in Iqaluit, the isolated capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, more than twelve thousand nautical miles from Toronto. While Toronto is Canada’s most populated city, with more than two and a half million people living there, Iqaluit has less than eight thousand residents. Other than being artists, Parry and Bathory shouldn’t have much in common. When they met, however, they developed a working relationship which fostered Kiinalik. A loose-knit...

Exile is at the heart of Heritage, Nicola McCartney’s tragedy set in 1920s Canada, in which Ulster emigres in search of some bright new tomorrow discover that the past isn’t easily left behind. Coming from Northern Ireland, McCartney’s roots as a writer were steeped in such themes when her play premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1998. In an interview during the run-up to the play’s opening, the then twenty-something writer described herself as a ‘voluntary exile’, who had left Belfast to study English and Theatre Studies at Glasgow University. Heritage was the play McCartney said she said she’d never write, yet the love across the barricades story in Heritage proved irresistible, as the hand-me-down mythologies depicted in the play are romanticised to the characters’ terminally destructive downfall.     Written in a spare poetic demotic that was a key form for many of McCartney’s generation of writers, Heritage arrived in the thick of what now looks like ...

Meghan Tyler was playing Stella in Emma Jordan’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire when she was working on Crocodile Fever, the Northern Irish actor and writer’s searing new play that forms part of the Traverse Theatre’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe season when it opens next week. That was in May at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, with whom Crocodile Fever is being presented in association, and where both Tyler and Jordan were acclaimed for their take on Tennessee Williams’ modern classic about sanity, madness and the family. “That was such a blast,” says Tyler. “Emma breathed new life into it, and showed that it’s still such a relevant piece of work. One of the main things I discovered is that Stella isn’t a wallflower as she’s sometimes seen to be. Why would Stanley be attracted to that? They need to butt heads a bit. It’s a play that completely engages our soul and our brain, and totally gets under your skin.” What effect if any Tyler’s experience has on Crocodile Fever remai...