Review: BLACKBIRD at United Hope Church

(Note: This review contains a content spoiler involving the play’s premise.)

You’re so close you can feel the actors breathe. 

Of course, there’s a lot to gasp about in Talk Is Free Theatre’s production of BLACKBIRD, an incredibly intimate staging of Scottish playwright David Harrower’s 2005 drama about a tense confrontation, years after the fact, between a man who had a sexual relationship with a middle schooler and the now grown woman who tracks him down. So it’s a good thing to have such unfettered access to that respiration.

Harrower’s harrowing work has seen both a Broadway production and a film adaptation, but director Dean Deffett’s version in Toronto lets you get so close to the actors that you can see their jaws clench and (almost) hear their hearts beat. It’s an explosive 80 minutes of theatre that benefits from the increased tension of a space where there’s nowhere to hide or even move.  

There are only around 20 seats in the undistinguished, worn back room of Hope United Church, which seems even smaller due to the detritus strewn over the table and on the floor. Fast food garbage with days or weeks of buildup lends a greasy sheen to the break room of the office where Ray (Cyrus Lane) has made a new life for himself after release from prison. He crowds Una (Kirstyn Russelle) into the dingy space, desperate to find somewhere to stash her for the talk she demands; that is, if he can’t get her to leave first. Tucked away like a dirty secret, she patiently answers his questions about how she determined his new identity–that identity now under threat if the wrong person were to open the door.

BLACKBIRD’s beginning is a little repetitive, as Ray blusters and tries every technique in the book not to begin the difficult work of reckoning with the past, and we wait for the story to unfold. However, once the playwright stops the stalling tactics, it become a searing and pointed story of bad choices and abuse, but also the need for connection that motivates people to do extreme and sometimes horrifying things. It’s far from an apologia for child sexual violation, but it looks unflinchingly at the topic from the vantage point of a single story, rather than as a general issue. 

That Ray can seem at all sympathetic is testament to the strength of the script and of Lane’s haunted performance, as he runs through his mental checklist of how he tried to make sure his interest in Una was genuine, not predatory and castigates himself for his prior behaviour, insisting that he’s changed. Yet he’s also angry that his past has returned, insisting he’s been punished enough while remaining ignorant that his actions gave his victim a sentence of a different kind, and that one’s life without parole. (While Harrower’s script is balanced and nuanced, viewers, particularly women, may find themselves having significantly less patience for this character in 2025 than they might have had in 2005.)

On the other hand, Una seems almost preternaturally composed on her mission, even if she admits that she’s not exactly sure what that is. Russelle’s performance provides a stark contrast to Lane’s nervous energy; a floating yet solid presence, she’s quite real but seems almost like a ghost out of Poe or Dickens, come to torment a wrongdoer. Her calm is almost magnetic, and it’s hard to look anywhere else when she speaks, reacts, or just waits for what’s next. When she begins to really explore Una’s full range of conflicted emotions, she sizzles with anguish; you remember that this seemingly composed woman wasn’t even a teenager when she began her doomed flirtation, and that, no matter how much Ray insists she was wise beyond her years, that’s as much a fiction as the front she puts up now. If we were to see her at 12, it would be unbearable.

There’s a real sense of danger in Deffett‘s production, which includes moments of darkness, chaos, and a constantly looming sense of that all-too-close outside world beyond the slamming and ominous door. From the front row, as Lane and Russelle tear through both psychological and physical garbage, you’d be forgiven for worrying you’re going to get hit in the crossfire. Yet the hands here are assured, and the physical shrapnel gets what feels like too close, but no closer.

With the actors’ breath in your ear, though, the emotional shrapnel might just hit you in the heart.