Tarragon Theatre’s world premiere of Bremen Town, written and directed by Gregory Prest, is a wonderfully original production. Genuine and frequently hilarious, the show uses a folktale frame to explore the topic of aging with pathos, compassion and a refreshing lack of sentimentality.
The story follows Frau Esel, the longest-serving housekeeper of Völksenhaus, who has been summarily fired and sent out to pasture after 45 years of hard work and dedication. In a rage, she sets out on a winding journey to Bremen to live with her estranged son. Along the way, she encounters three other outcasts — Herr Hund, Herr Katze and Frau Henne — each of whom has also been dismissed by the world they once served. What then unfolds is a rural folk tragicomedy that looks unflinchingly at the forces of time, aging, and a society that deems its old folks “useless”. The show’s crowning achievement is its deft tonal balance, which bridges laughter and lament, tenderness and bite. In our era of longer lifespans married with the cultural dismissal or downright derision of older people, the folktale-inspired Bremen Town is – painfully – both timeless and timely.
Prest’s creator’s note offers the production’s moral key. He recalls a story told by his mother about her grandmother, a woman who once ran her household with pride, but in decline, struggled to find purpose. To preserve her sense of dignity, Prest’s grandmother would bring her mother (Prest’s great grandmother) into the kitchen, set her down with a bowl of peas, and ask her to shell them before supper. It took her an hour to shell a dozen, but the act itself mattered: she was of use. In passing that story along, Prest’s mother added her own message: “Have patience with me, and give me something to do, because I know it’s coming.” This intergenerational reverberation forms the play’s quiet theology. Drawing from the Brothers Grimm tale of discarded animals who form a band, Prest turns the fable into a study of endurance and dignity, and how companionship and empathy can keep us tethered to meaning.
Visually, the production finds eloquence in simplicity. Nancy Perrin’s set and costume design situate the story in a world that is at once rural and dreamlike. A carved wooden frame, containing monochromatic scenes of animals and trees encircles the stage. Like a picture-book border or the panels of a comic book, it recalls shadow-puppet theatres or woodcut illustrations, thereby underscoring the story’s mythic literary inheritance. Within that frame, Perrin’s textures of weathered cloth and muted earth tones evoke the domestic, and representationally conjure the physical challenges of Frau Esel’s cross-land journey. Meanwhile, Logan Raju Cracknell’s lighting breathes through the space, shifting readily from barnyard dusk to spectral glow to magical, starlit night.
Music is equally integral to this story. Composer-performer Tatjana Cornij is Vogel, the accordion-bearing narrator, who provides a continuous live score whose flourishes punctuate the plot, and guide both tone and pacing. Her folk-inflected compositions thread humour, melancholy, and fairytale shimmer into the storytelling – allowing her to function equally as a conscience for and a commentator on Frau Esel. The music’s rustic lilt bridges realism and myth as it punctuates transitions and emotional turns. Together with Kelly McEvenue’s movement direction and Peter Fernandes’ light-touch stage magic, it creates a theatrical language that feels handmade, cohesive and almost mythic. Elements such as a kite festival, a dancing bear show, recurring sleight-of-hand, and moments of puppetry and ingeniously stylised choreography enrich the folk-story atmosphere without lapsing into whimsy for its own sake.
At the production’s heart are Nancy Palk and Oliver Dennis, whose textured performances form a study in contrast and compassion. Palk’s Frau Esel is razor-sharp yet deeply human: a woman whose intellect and acerbic tongue have become her armour against neglect. She moves with the deliberateness of someone conserving energy, but every glance, word and inflection lands – and often slices – with precision. There is steel in her wit, but beneath it, the dull ache of someone who has given her entire life to usefulness, only to be (inexplicably to her) cast aside. It’s a superb performance that delivers signature Palk: funny, unsentimental, and devastating.
Dennis’ Herr Hund, who is a bumbling, debt-ridden magician clinging to his threadbare bag of tricks, complements her perfectly. He brings physical comedy, warmth, unrelenting hope … and an undercurrent of melancholy. His timing is effortless and his emotional shifts are unforced: when the tricks falter, we glimpse the loneliness behind the smile. Together, Palk and Dennis create a partnership that feels comfortable and true.
A second very different partnership exists between Sheila McCarthy’s Frau Henne and William Webster’s Herr Katze. Gentle, soft-spoken, hard of hearing – and gradually descending into dementia – Frau Henne provides a heartbreaking counterpoint to Frau Esel’s alert precision, while her companion Herr Katze, lends gruff dignity and dry humour. Together, the unlikely quartet forge a friendship — grudging at first — that reveals the affirming potential of humanity in the most unexpected circumstances.
Around them, the ensemble completes the portrait with sensitivity. Dan Mousseau, Veronica Hortigüela, and Farhang Ghajar perform an array of younger characters whom the foursome encounter, and infuse the world with comical movement, curiosity, and ignorance that underscore the generational contrasts animating Prest’s script. As the story progresses, the elderly quartet’s shared journey becomes less about escape and more about recognition: the gradual discovery that even those deemed obsolete can find purpose in one another’s company.
And that discovery echoes beyond the stage. In Canada, 59 percent of unretired adults say they do not expect ever to retire fully; and nearly half (49 percent) report having saved nothing for retirement in the past year, while just 43 percent felt they earned enough to save at all (HOOPP & Abacus Data, 2025 Canadian Retirement Survey). And among older adults already retired, inequities deepen: racialized women 65 and older have a poverty rate more than double that of non-racialized women — 9.1 percent vs. 4.2 percent (Statistics Canada, A Portrait of Women Aged 65 and Older in Canada, 2024, Catalogue 11-627-M2024057). These figures expose a cultural and economic vulnerability that Prest’s folktale characters embody with startling clarity: people who have worked all their lives, yet find themselves alone and in peril because they are valued only for their productivity, not for their experience, presence, or humanity.
Underlying the play is a broader reflection on how societies define human worth. The notion of an “expiry date” attached to age feels distinctly Western, as this conceit is foreign to the concept of seva, the idea of selfless service and mutual care that is central to many Eastern traditions. My own family’s 3-story ancestral home in India, built in 1913, was designed around intergenerational co-living, with apartments on each floor intended to house a different generation — an architectural expression of this ethos of shared responsibility, respect, and inherited knowledge and values. On a recent trip to India, however, I was struck by the rise of assisted-living facilities in this culture once defined by reverence for elders. To me, it signals a creeping global shift in how we understand aging and care: a move from familial norm to outsourced professional management. Prest captures that change, and the precariousness it creates, in a haunting and compelling way. Bremen Town suggests clearly that a culture’s treatment of its elders lays bare its values – both moral and economic. And that value resides in reciprocity, connection, and the dignity to keep one another in view, bowls of peas in hand.
Like its characters, Bremen Town itself has deepened with time, evolving from a Soulpepper Academy project to its 2023 Next Stage Festival debut, and finally into this richly realized and superbly performed Tarragon premiere. We should all be delighted and supportive – for we can all be enriched by the way it wears its years-long evolution with wit, wisdom and grace.
Bremen Town continues on stage at the Tarragon Theatre Mainstage until October 26, 2025. Don’t wait too long to see it. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
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