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SPYCRAFT is Coming to The Theatre Centre in November

Performances will run from November 22-28, 2025.

By: Oct. 13, 2025
SPYCRAFT is Coming to The Theatre Centre in November Image

Directed by renowned Canadian theatre director Richard Greenblatt and starring Diane Flacks, Blair Williams, Charlotte Dennis and Devin Lee, Spycraft is a two-act espionage thriller that has its world premiere October 30-November 30, 2025 in a 26-performance Ontario tour, with seven shows at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, November 22-28, 2025.

When a middle-aged Canadian woman, who is also a hidden Jew, joins the British Special Operations Executive during WW2 as a spy in Occupied France, her male colleague is skeptical she'll make a difference because she's a woman - and an 'old' one at that. However, she defies expectations and challenges the chauvinism and ageism of the times by using her invisibility as an asset, and employing a classically female craft to pass coded intelligence about the Nazis to the Allies: knitting.

Produced by Kirk Dunn and Claire Ross Dunn's A Yarn or Two Arts Collective, Spycraft was born out of the research they did for their previous show, The Knitting Pilgrim, about Kirk's 15-year journey knitting three giant panels, designed in the style of stained-glass windows, which look at the relationship amongst the Abrahamic faiths. The writers read that women used knitting during major conflicts to spy on the enemy, either by eavesdropping on them in plain sight, because no one felt threatened by female knitters (especially middle-aged ones), or by knitting code into ordinary garments to get messages out undetected.

"We instantly knew it was a great idea for a play," says Kirk Dunn. "We felt like we could write a cracking good, classic, suspenseful spy tale in the vein of Casablanca, The Imitation Game, or Operation Mincemeat, but turn the story on its head by making knitting, of all things, the spycraft. How unpredictable is that?"

Born in Montréal, director Richard Greenblatt is an actor, writer, musician, and director who has been a theatre artist for over 5 decades. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England, he has directed over 150 productions, both classical and contemporary. He has won 7 Dora Mavor Moore Awards and 2 Chalmers Awards.

"Spycraft is a piece that works on several levels simultaneously," says Greenblatt. "It's an exciting, action-packed spy thriller. It has a fascinating heroine who continuously surprises us with her courage, determination and inventiveness. It is a reminder of just how sexist and ageist our society was, not that long ago. And it confronts the difficult issue of exactly how much courage it can take to reveal one's true identity to the world, no matter the consequences."

The production has pulled together an impressive team.

The cast consists of acclaimed actor Diane Flacks, recently seen across Canada in the theatrical adaptation of Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall on Your Knees and in the playwright's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) at Newfoundland's Perchance Theatre; Shaw Festival veteran actor and director Blair Williams, who has also been seen at the Blyth Festival, Thousand Islands Playhouse, and The Foster Festival; Charlotte Dennis, most recently seen in Steel Magnolias at the Capitol Theatre in Port Hope; and Devin Lee, who is a graduate of the NYU Tisch Drama program, where he studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, and the Atlantic Acting School.

The script was dramaturged by Greenblatt and well-known playwright, dramaturge and audiobook director Beverley Cooper, and written by knitter-actor-writer Kirk Dunn and screenwriter/playwright/author Claire Ross Dunn, who has written several romance movies for Hallmark, City TV, and Amazon Prime, as well as, on TV, for Little Mosque on the Prairie and Degrassi: The Next Generation. Her first novel, At Last Count, is a Globe and Mail Best Book and was a Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer romance finalist in 2025.

The show's set, costumes, and lights are being designed by Dora Award-winning Nick Blais, whose work has been seen at Mirvish, Coal Mine, The Grand, Factory Theatre, Outside the March, and more; original music and sound are composed and designed by Dora nominee Heidi Chan, well-known for their work at Blyth Festival, Outside the March, and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre; and the knitted costumes and props are being designed by Kirk Dunn, whose one-man show The Knitting Pilgrim has been seen 120 times in 6 countries, and whose knitting has been covered in The Toronto Star, Vogue Knitting, Family Circle Knitting, Knitting Magazine (UK), Maclean's Magazine, Enroute Magazine, and on CBC Radio. Kirk's most recent knitted work, The Patchwork Pride Project, was displayed on the face of Canada House, the home of the Canadian High Commission in London's Trafalgar Square for Pride month 2025.

Spycraft's knitted costumes will be historically accurate designs, several inspired by archival patterns at the Victoria & Albert and Imperial War Museums. All will be embedded with code, containing secret messages. A social media campaign also has knitters from near and far donating handknitted socks-many of them coded-to be seen onstage during the play.

The production of Spycraft is timely. In addition to being an entertaining, suspenseful thriller, the show is touring during November to resonate with Remembrance Day and Holocaust Education Week, touching on themes of antisemitism and the Holocaust-especially vital now with hate crimes, antisemitic and otherwise, on the rise globally.

The production is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council, with the sponsorship of Canadian yarn producers and suppliers Briggs & Little, Topsy Farms, and Cabin Boy Knits.

Tour dates as follows:

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