When audiences arrive at 918 Bathurst for Actors Repertory Company’s (ARC) Toronto premiere of Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror, directed by newly minted ARC Artistic Producer Tamara Vuckovic, they are welcomed to a wedding.
But it’s not quite the happy occasion it seems.
What instead unfolds is a journey through a shifting theatrical maze that interrogates censorship, authorship, and the uneasy relationship between art and power. Premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2023 before transferring to the Trafalgar Theatre, A Mirror imagines a totalitarian regime where storytelling itself becomes a critical site of control.
At the centre of ARC’s production is Nabil Traboulsi as Celik, Director of the Ministry of Culture. In Holcroft’s layered narrative, a mechanic named Adem has written a raw, verbatim play about life in his grim housing block. He draws the attention of Celik, who seeks to reshape the work into state-approved propaganda. Celik enlists his assistant Mei and the celebrated playwright Bax in this task, and what follows is a clandestine theatrical event disguised as a wedding reception – blurring fiction and reality as a strategy for survival.
For Traboulsi, his attraction to Celik was immediate. “Celik is a man who deeply understands the role that art plays in society, and its relation to power,” he notes. “Dramaturgically, he represents the hold a state (whether a government or any centralized power) has in shaping narratives that suits it.” That conceptual frame, however, is just the starting point. “I was quickly intrigued by how he uses language to deeply affect the people around him,” Traboulsi enthuses. “Throughout our exploration in rehearsals, I got to understand his human side – with all its flaws and contradictions – and that has been very exciting.”
Travelling into A Mirror
Holcroft’s play is, by design, slippery and layered. Loosely inspired by the playwright’s experiences while travelling, including a formative trip to North Korea, A Mirror has been described as a tricksy, dystopian satire that blends reality and performance, often with startling effects. What begins as a staged wedding quickly becomes a ruse that is one part play-within-a-play, one part commentary on repression, and one part an invitation to witness how narratives can be shaped and subverted.
Across its various productions, critics have noted the play’s penchant for dual identities, false realities, and theatrical mirages that keep audiences alert and intrigued. In essence, A Mirror reflects both what we see and what we think we see – and asks us to consider the politics behind those reflections. Yet Holcroft’s script refuses easy binaries. Celik is not a cartoon villain: he is persuasive, articulate, and deeply invested in his own justification.
That moral slipperiness is part of what gives the play its bite. And in rehearsal, the themes have felt anything but distant. “Governments have studied and implemented ways to affect and control public opinion since the 1920s with Edward Bernays’ work,” Traboulsi notes. And conversations in the room have extended well beyond the fictional regime on stage. “One of the things we talked about is the power tech companies have in shaping one’s worldview: we only know what’s within the bounds of what social media algorithms show us. It’s no secret that governments, corporations, and media/tech companies work together to shape narratives and oftentimes silence dissent.”
Finding himself on the other side
Traboulsi is candid about the urgency he feels. “The obvious recent example is the censorship of pro-Palestinian voices speaking up against the genocide, either through online suppression, lawfare tactics – or when all else fails, brute force and arrests. This play is rich with very current themes. And those are just a few of the discussions we have had around it.”
Traboulsi is a familiar presence on Toronto stages. With ARC alone, he has had memorable turns in Rockabye, Martyr, Gloria, and Oil. His broader theatre credits include Homes: A Refugee Story at the Grand Theatre, Entre Deux Mondes at Théâtre Tangente, and multiple productions with Théâtre Français de Toronto. He has also been seen on screen in Murdoch Mysteries, The Boys, Titans, and Accused (to name a few), having built a career that moves fluidly across mediums and languages.
And that cross-cultural life intersects unexpectedly with A Mirror. Holcroft dedicated the play in part to Lebanese playwright and director Lucien Bourjeily, who is known for confronting censorship in his own work, and is very familiar to Rabouls. “I had worked with Lucien Bourjeily on two occasions as we performed his immersive devised piece Vanishing State at different festivals in Europe,” he recalls. “As we were looking for ARC’s next play, it was a surprise to see his name in the opening pages of the book. And it felt like it was a sign that this play is important to stage right now. I’m always working between languages and cultures, and I love when these different parts of my life intersect in beautiful and unexpected ways.”
Enabling audiences to look in the mirror
If A Mirror is about a state’s attempt to author reality, it is also about our willingness to accept the script we are handed. Traboulsi hopes audiences will leave questioning more than just the fictional regime on stage: “I personally feel that we need to talk more about censorship and free speech in Canada and the West, and this play has all the elements needed to start that conversation.”
“Unfortunately,” he laments, “in the arts, these issues are only talked about in the context of conservative or right-wing politics.” But Traboulsi wants people “to realize that these rights have been eroded over time by governments from both major parties, because the truth is that politicians are heavily influenced by money and corporate interests.” So for him, the play’s implications ripple outward.
“A Mirror is about stories: We have only recently started questioning narratives like the so-called Doctrine of Discovery which completely erased indigenous peoples and covered up the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the whole continent.” In the same vein, “I want people to start questioning every story we are told today: the wars, the shrinking value of our money, the pharmacological approach to mental and physical health, just to name a few.”
For Naboulsi, working with ARC on this Toronto premiere is an extraordinarily vital and important act. It feels simply “electric to be talking about these topics with an incredible team of very smart and curious artists.”
And beyond the stage, there is more to tease on his immediate horizon. “You can catch Craig Lauzon (who plays Bax in A Mirror) and myself in the upcoming horror thriller Ithaqua coming out sometime this year, directed by Casey Walker and starring Luke Hemsworth, Kevin Durand and Michael Pitt!”
For now, the invitation to a wedding has been proffered to Toronto audiences. A Mirror runs March 10 to 28, 2026 at 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media & Education in Toronto. Tickets are available at arcstage.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
