Four years ago, playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s mentor, the late playwright Linda Griffiths, recommended a book to her. It was God’s Secretaries, a history of the men who first translated the King James Bible, which drew on Hebrew and Greek scripture as well as a century of earlier English translations, most heavily William Tyndale’s. Griffiths had described their act of translation as a collective undertaking, akin to the collaborative worlds of collective creation and television writing that Corbeil-Coleman already knew. This interested her, but the material tugged at something deeper and more personal, rooted in her own parents’ history – something which grew into The King James Bible Play, now running at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre.
She is the daughter of theatre director Layne Coleman and novelist/critic Carole Corbeil, who died when Corbeil-Coleman was fifteen. The loss, she states, is what turned her into a writer. She went on to train in the playwriting program at the National Theatre School. Her plays – which include Twisted, Sudden Death, Guarded Girls, the Hawksley Workman collaboration Almost a Full Moon, and Madame Minister (which plays in Toronto January 21 to 29, 2027) – have collected a Dora Mavor Moore Award, the Herman Voaden Award, the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, and two Governor General’s Award nominations.
“My parents were both raised very religious, and they really rebelled against religion,” Corbeil-Coleman recalls. Watching that rebellion as a child, and later becoming a parent herself, sharpened into an interest in translation. Faith, she saw, is something that gets passed from hand to hand: “We are all receiving religion from someone… and then it gets translated through us.”
Translating through theatre, time, and gender
Research revealed the detail that would give the play its spine: the real-life translators worked much the way a theatre company does, with a director-like figure presiding over men who had to speak each word aloud together, in order to approve it. “Very theatrical,” she smiles. She knew immediately that she wanted to write not just about those men, but about a company of women staging a play about them: “I was interested in acting as translation, and in translating history.”
The play’s subject text was not incidental: the King James Bible’s outsized influence on English — seen in the copious idioms and cadences it left behind — drew her as a writer. So, too, did the oblique relationship between the clergymen and the theatre of their day, as they toiled in the shadow of Shakespeare’s influence on the language they worked with. Theirs was not the first English Bible translation, Corbeil-Coleman notes, but it was seminal because it broke from the Latin Bible and drove a surge in English literacy.
The production establishes its thematic focus on language in its opening minutes, as the men gather around a rented pineapple and debate what to call it: should it be “ananas,” inherited from languages descended from Latin, or “pineapple,” the English coinage of their moment. It’s a single object, but its inflection and connotation depend on which language reaches it first. This is just the start: the malleability and dynamism of language reverberate throughout the play and the centuries it traverses.
The final major ingredient was the tension between eras, which plays out smartly in the play’s specific ensemble. In the first act, which takes place in 1609, the elaborately garbed translators do their work. Sir Henry Savile (a rich, multi-faceted Cyrus Lane), his son Willie (a winning Steven Hao), John Bois (a searing Gray Powell), George Abbot (Rylan Wilkie) and John Perrin (Michael Spencer-Davis) argue their way through the translation. Then in the second act, which takes place in the present, a company of casually clad actresses — including Roni (Liz Der), director Martie (a perfectly cast Deborah Hay), Han (an achingly moving Vivien Endicott-Douglas), Anna (an irresistibly airy Gen Z Angel Lo) and Cath (Stratford veteran Sara Topham) — rehearse a play about the translators.
Women play the seventeenth-century men in the rehearsal-room timeline, a device about which Corbeil-Coleman is circumspect: “It asks questions around them — like, ‘why is this play all about men?’ I don’t want to talk too much about it, because I don’t want to give away the answers. But I love watching women play men, because you get to see their own relationships with men. And the man that lives inside of you gets to come out.”
She calls it a play “about holding multiple things” — including the translation of gender within an actor’s body. Having seen and enjoyed the play greatly, I will say that watching the full play asks viewers to do the same thing, and then rewards them in Act 2 with new layers that re-frame their understanding in challenging and moving ways.
The cast, the characters, and their resonance
Corbeil-Coleman is as attached to the people delivering these performances as she is to the roles themselves: “I love them. Everybody in this cast has given so much of themselves to this piece. They’ve worked so hard. I don’t think I’ve ever quite experienced it to this level, because the play is grabbing at such big things, and people have brought so much of themselves creatively.” It’s also “a very special cast for me” on a purely personal level: “A lot of these people I’ve admired for a really long time: some actors in Toronto I’ve always wanted to work with, and some I’ve known since I was a child, because I grew up in the theatre. I’m just so grateful they said yes.”
Corbeil-Coleman traces the two-timeline structure of the play to how she understands translation itself: “You’re taking what’s come before, and you’re also looking towards where something is going to go.” She resists the idea that the play is narrowly about scripture, calling it instead a meditation on the act of creation writ large: “what it means to create something, whether that be a Bible, or a play, or a child — and your relationship with who created you.”
Audiences certainly do not need a background in Christianity, or in the history of the King James Bible itself, to connect with it, she avers. During previews and early performances, what has consistently moved audiences, devout and agnostic alike, is the intertwined and universal material beneath the theology: the focus on language, collaboration, relationships, and family.
The collaboration
Director Nina Lee Aquino — whom Corbeil-Coleman calls a “playwright’s director”, who who has “devoted so much of her life to new work” — has, at Corbeil-Coleman’s request, been present at every rehearsal The two kept adjusting the script all the way through previews because “the audience, too, is the last piece of the translation. You learn so much from them.”
The collaboration extends beyond Aquino to the whole design team: “That’s what’s incredible about theatre: you have to leave room for other people. It’s not a novel, though even there, you’re in relationship with how the reader imagines what you’re saying. But in theatre, you have to leave space for other artists to come and fill it up. That’s what I find so powerful, and beautiful — and scary, too.”
The finished production bears out that ambition. What lingers most is how thoroughly its formal choices enact its subject. Language is treated as recursive and dynamic, rather than fixed: folding back on 1609, even as it moves forward into the rehearsal room, so the structure performs the argument its characters are making. The performances match that intelligence, and the design — Robin Fisher’s elegant sets and costumes, Michelle Ramsay’s evocative lighting, and John Gzowski’s atmospheric sound — gives the two timelines distinct, fully inhabited textures.
The result is spellbinding and genuinely complex, and will reward a repeat visit. Its insights about gender, creation, parenthood — and the assumptions we bring to them — are a real gift, and one the play prefers audiences arrive at through revelation, rather than explanation. To say more risks spoiling that pleasure. Let me simply call it a rich, beautiful and layered work of theatre.
Now … and next
With her long-gestating play now open, Corbeil-Coleman is already turning toward something newer and rawer: a first-draft reading of I Quit the Band at Here For Now Theatre. The play, which is set against the climate crisis and deals with themes of friendship and jealousy, focuses on a musician who quits a band on the cusp of fame. The reading, directed by Jonathan Symons, reunites her with longtime collaborators Vivien Endicott-Douglas and Virgilia Griffiths. Corbeil-Coleman is candid about the vulnerability of sharing unfinished work in our product-driven culture: “It’s hard to let people into something that isn’t done.” But she sees value in letting audiences witness a piece “on its way”— and need look no further than the way early workshops shaped The King James Bible Play.
With its Stratford premiere now passed, Corbeil-Coleman is hungry for connection, more than critical judgment. She wrote the play not seeking praise, but hoping to move people’s hearts and brains at once, in a direction “they haven’t maybe thought or expected”. Letting go of this play now, which she has carried for four years, is bittersweet. Offered the comparison of sending a child out into the world, she agrees … and then complicates it: “It’s still mine… but other people are going to interact with it.” This doubleness – of translation and growth — is where she leaves The King James Bible Play: “It’s going to belong to the world. And it’s not mine anymore.”
The King James Bible Play runs through September 26, 2026, at the Studio Theatre, before transferring to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa for a run at the Azrieli Studio, November 11 to 21, 2026. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
