Jennifer Fawcett’s Apples in Winter arrives at Here for Now Theatre in association with Hope and Hell Theatre Company, marking its Canadian premiere under the sensitive direction of Robert Ross Parker. At the play’s centre is Miriam, a mother preparing her only son’s last meal before his execution. Over the course of 70 extraordinary minutes, Miriam talks about her son and bakes an apple pie — a mundane act that becomes a crucible for memory, grief, and unconditional love.
The play has garnered strong praise internationally, and this production affirms why. Brigitte Solem, alone on stage as Miriam, gives a performance that is at once restrained and devastating. There is no easy catharsis here: Solem embodies a woman who must carry the unbearable weight of her son’s violent crime, while also confronting her own bewilderment, grief and guilt. A mesmerizing stillness, paired with the speed changes, pauses, and cracks in her voice betray just how close to the brink she is.
Fawcett’s writing never sentimentalizes Miriam’s story. Instead, it examines the toll of violence from a perspective rarely centred: that of the family of the perpetrator. By conveying the dialogue and action entirely through Miriam, the play insists that we witness how crime ripples outward beyond the victims and the justice system to the ordinary people who endure unseen collateral damage. Meditations on addiction, the death penalty, and the wider justice system emerge organically through Miriam’s recollections. Yet what lingers most is the universality of her emotions: the impossible conflict she experiences between anger and compassion, and blame and love. And the play refuses to offer either answers or absolution – which is precisely what makes it so resonant.
The staging is a deceptively simple enabler. As Miriam peels apples and rolls pastry, the pie grows before our eyes into a metaphor for ritual, for care, and for the impossibility of repairing what has been broken. Watching Solem’s deliberate movements — measured, almost ceremonial — draws the audience into a kind of suspended time. The gradual build of tension is underscored by silences that Parker allows to breathe, creating space for Miriam to be alone with her thoughts and for the audience’s own reflection. The kitchen set (designed by Darren Burkett) amplifies this duality: while the warm, homey associations of baking suggest comfort and a mother’s touch, we soon understand that this is not her own kitchen. Instead, it is the sterile, institutional kitchen of the untrusting, punishment-focused penitentiary — with its working oven, stocked fridge, and knife chained to the stainless steel counter.
The production’s ultimate power lies in its intimacy. With just one performer, the audience cannot retreat; we are placed directly inside Miriam’s solitude. She speaks directly to us from her tortured heart. And by the play’s end, the intimate theatre feels weighted with unspoken emotion, a shared recognition of the complex aftermath of love and loss.
While Apples in Winter can fairly be described as brutal, it is also undeniably compassionate. It dares to ask what justice, forgiveness, and love can look like, when they are tested by the unimaginable. In Solem’s hands, Miriam is not just a grieving mother, but a figure through whom we confront our assumptions about control and our ideas of punishment and mercy.
In this production, Here for Now Theatre has delivered a gut-punch production that is spare, haunting, and profoundly human. Apples in Winter is a reminder that theatre, at its best, brings us face to face with questions that resist resolution … and makes us grateful for the discomfort to sit with them.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
