Stratford has a raunchy and raucous new hit on its hands.
The Tao of the World is writer-director Jovanni Sy’s next joyous act of artistic and cultural alchemy. Two years ago, his A Salesman in China used Arthur Miller’s tragedy to build an unlikely, exquisite bridge between cultures. Now Sy has taken even more staid source material—William Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Way of the World from 1700—and transformed it into a kinetic, fearless and fantastically funny look at sex, class, gender and relationships, set among Singapore’s ultra-wealthy elite.
This diverse-cast rom-com would feel right at home at Toronto’s Soulpepper or Crow’s Theatre. But as an older white guy who can proxy for a certain element of Stratford’s traditional audience, I’ll call it an envelope-pusher for the Festival. The Tao of the World is unapologetically modern in its wide lens, bawdy in its language, and frank in its discussion of sex. Younger audience members will whoop it up with delighted laughter. Some older subscribers—more comfortable with the way of the world as it was, rather than as it is—will squirm. So be it.
The source
Congreve’s original is a defining comedy of manners in which courtship becomes social warfare. Mirabell and Millamant, two intelligent lovers, try to marry on terms that preserve both affection and independence, while money, inheritance, reputation and an array of competing schemes threaten to derail them. The famous “proviso scene,” in which they negotiate the conditions of their prospective marriage, gives the play a question that is strikingly durable and was especially fraught for a woman of the time: how much of oneself must be surrendered to enter an intimate partnership?
There’s modernity in the voice Congreve gives the heroine Millamant—but also ageist cruelty in the way her mother’s sexual desires are treated as grotesque. Sy preserves and amplifies the fun, while re-focusing the judgment on modern concerns.
The Tao
He does this by transplanting Congreve’s architecture into 2022 Singapore, filtering its intrigues through a Crazy Rich Asians–style milieu of extreme wealth, dynastic expectation, and social performance. The fit is tight: this is a glamorous world where romance remains inseparable from family power, social standing, and who ultimately controls the fortune.
Agnes Tong’s sexy, sinewy Arabella Flynn is our scheming narrator: a whip-smart, entitled aristocrat who knows what she wants (or at least thinks she does). From her opening introduction of cricket-star heartthrob and former lover Edward Lim (a winningly earnest Angus Yam), she pulls no punches: delivering catty commentary and outsized gestures as she prowls the set and comments on the action. Arabella speaks to the other characters and then right to us, as time slides backward and forward. The idiosyncratic and irrepressible story logic directly reflects her dynamism: at certain moments, she even breaks out of flashbacks into the present, and has to be “sent back” to them.
Around her orbits a wickedly entangled cast. Heidi Sy Damano’s breezy, sensual Millicent Tan is Arabella’s surprise rival for Edward, but also her confidant. Millicent is uninhibited and unapologetic about her desires—and the rebuilt “proviso scene” between her and Edward modernizes her expectations and sexual initiative to a degree that will scandalize at least some of those Stratford subscription-holders. A delightful Manami Hara fills the space as Lady Helena, the controlling, self-satisfied and still-adventurous matriarch calling the shots on Millicent’s future. She will be schooled for her manipulations, and great fun will derive from her predilections, but she is never mocked for being an older woman who wants.
Karthik Kadam’s expressive Devan, son of the family’s beloved late housekeeper, inhabits an interesting status as Arabella’s quasi-brother and partner in crime, while navigating his own tender but volatile relationship with Jackson Lee (Derek Kwan). Meanwhile, Sara-Jeanne Hosie chews scenery as the lustful, belittled Eleanor Marwood. She is conducting an affair with Arabella’s husband Trevor (a game Tim Campbell) — but he is so fully outside the scope of the omnipresent Arabella’s interests that he almost never appears in the same scene as her. And Michael Man appears to be enjoying himself immensely in his ultra-broad and deliciously confused role as Dr. Wilson Wong, the Saskatchewan plastic surgeon deployed by Lady Helena as an approved match for Millicent.
Lorenzo Savoini’s simple yet sumptuous set, Ming Wong’s stylish costumes, Sophie Tang’s nimble lighting and Michelle Cutler’s skilled sound design — which at peak moments come together for full-cast Mandopop numbers — create spectacle that matches the verbal dazzle and the emotional stakes.
More than sex and money
Critically, Sy is fearless and encompassing in his concerns. Yes, The Tao of the World is carnal, catty and covetous — and this is a big part of its charm. But the show never lets us forget that inheritances and relationship rules are not organic: they are the sanitized outcome of systemic predation and exclusion.
The play is set in 2022 partly to participate in the specific moment when Section 377A, which criminalized sexual activity between men in Singapore, was repealed … and at the same moment, marriage was constitutionally reaffirmed as the union of a man and a woman. One step forward, one back. Edward wryly demurs from adjudicating a dispute between the gay couple, noting drily that his people colonized Jackson’s Malay ancestors and then exploited Devan’s Indian ones, so he will “sit this one out.”
The 2022 setting also places the story squarely in the shadow of the pandemic. This enables Sy to give the servants, present but silent throughout the first act, a messy but meaningful moment to seize center stage — as they would have during their work as “essential workers” during the pandemic. Nadine Villasin’s deferential-yet-cutting Kamila and Nestor Lozano Jr.’s more strident Toto are delights, as they indict their invisibility in both society and the theatre itself. While hilarious, Toto’s plaintive final cry from mid-audience lingers as one more intentionally untidy element in this ultra-slick spectacle.
The alchemy
The Tao of the World is ultimately a delirious dance of equal-opportunity laughter. Love makes fools of us all, and every character here becomes ridiculous in some way — in particular in the second act, when an urban estate becomes a modern-day Forest of Arden, criss-crossed by a web of lovers spying on, bemoaning, pursuing, and sometimes catching one another.
And beneath the froth of carnality, scheming, manipulation and blackmail, Arabella is headed for an unexpected reckoning with her own myopia — one that flows ingeniously from the COVID-19 context, lands a surprising and satisfying conclusion, and neatly re-positions everything we’ve been watching from the start.
In The Tao of the World, Sy and his cast and crew have tremendous fun transforming a sturdy, staid Restoration play into a cathartically modern, delightfully Singaporean experience. That experience seems bound to send audiences out of the Tom Patterson Theatre talking, laughing, and (I wager) feeling a little more optimistic about the future.
It’s messy, but so is growth. That’s the alchemy.
The Tao of the World plays at the Tom Patterson Theatre through September 26, 2026. For tickets and information, visit stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
