Darkness. A woman’s voice, urgent and afraid, describing spiders, green that is chasing her, and much more. “Beware the white rose!” And then, slowly …. light. But not full light. Not waking light. The kind of half-lit murk where dreams bleed into the room around you.
This is how Ho Ka Kei (Jeff Ho)’s Prophetess begins: with Margaret Anjou, legendary professor and self-styled “Queen of Etymology,” caught somewhere between sleep and waking. Between the words she speaks and the symbols that haunt her.
It’s disorienting to watch, and it’s also a promise. This world premiere at Tarragon Theatre, directed by Mike Payette, will ask you to inhabit this liminal space for ninety minutes — to feel language as something that surrounds, houses, constrains and shapes us. It’s going to be a cathartic, but also a deeply demanding experience.
The Shakespeare you may need
Ho Ka Kei, a playwright whose previous works include cockroach, Iphigenia and the Furies (On Taurian Land), Antigone: 方, trace and esmé, has built Prophetess on the bones of Shakespeare’s rarely-staged first tetralogy: Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, plus Richard III. You don’t need to know these plays to follow the action. But knowing their shape deepens the resonance.
Shakespeare’s tetralogy dramatizes the Wars of the Roses, which pit Lancaster’s red versus York’s white. At its centre stands Margaret of Anjou: French queen, general, widow, and finally, in Richard III, cursing prophetess, whose dire predictions all come true. After losing her husband, her son and her power, she watches the white-rose court devour itself. And when the survivors beg her to teach them how to curse, she obliges.
Ho transplants this struggle to modern academia—specifically, to the suggestively named York University. Here, the Wars of the Roses become departmental turf battles over tenure and syllabi. Crowns become committee chairs. And Margaret’s curses? They become something stranger: a vehicle for exploring whether language can shape the future and redeem the past … or only transmit the present.
The Queen of Etymology
Karen Robinson’s Margaret is a force of nature. Her power is cerebral, rooted in her expertise in etymology, the study of how words came to be. But Robinson plays this cerebral passion as something ferocious and physical. She doesn’t just discuss language. She inhabits it: half-inside the words she speaks, and half-outside, where she assesses their histories and reduces them to their essential meanings like a sauce simmering down on the stove.
When Margaret wakes from that opening nightmare and begins to interact with others like her husband Henry and new colleague Anne, she starts unspooling the origins of words mid-conversation, pivoting from intimate dialogue to impromptu lecture and back. Robinson makes the shift feel utterly natural. This is simply how Margaret thinks. How she lives. And as the play reveals the grief she’s navigating—a terrible, life-draining kind of loss—the performance becomes something more: disorienting, harrowing, and deeply moving. As she navigates her character’s emphatic but liminal existence, Robinson holds the stage with the authority of a performer who knows exactly what she’s doing … and trusts us to follow.
A court in tweed
The supporting cast, each echoing a Shakespearean counterpart, populates Margaret’s world with threats.
Natasha Mumba’s Anne is a newly arrived professor. Accomplished and compassionate, she picks her way through what she slowly realizes is a political minefield. In Shakespeare, Anne becomes Richard III’s queen—and her curse on his future wife falls, ironically, on herself. Here, Anne is positioned as Margaret’s eventual successor, which makes her both protégé and threat. Mumba plays the role with an open intelligence, as someone genuinely trying to understand the rules of a game whose stakes keep shifting.
Christine Horne’s Elizabeth—head of HR, voice of the York University administration—is the play’s sharpest satirical blade. With deadened delivery and a smile that never reaches her eyes, Horne embodies the worst of institutional power. Two-faced (or perhaps I should say two-tongued), she wields procedure and documentation as weapons, while calling it “protection.” And she comes bearing the white roses warned of in Margaret’s dream: the Shakespearean echo is unmistakable.
Rick Roberts pulls double duty as Dicky — a simpering, absurdly coiffed Richard III parallel, who is another ambitious and slippery academic aspirant — and as Henry, Margaret’s husband, who is in every way her loving, supportive partner. The contrast between the two roles underscores the play’s interest in how names and identities can slip and double — and how ultimately, all that defines our differences is our words.
A hallowed space for language
Jawon Kang’s set is stunning: a wood-panelled, pillared room wrapped in multicoloured stained-glass lancet windows that refract light from beyond. With its sturdy table and red-cushioned chairs, the space conjures both an academic sanctum and a house of worship. Abetted by simple repositionings of the furniture, Logan Raju Cracknell’s lighting shifts the space seamlessly between Margaret’s home, a York lecture hall, and an administrative office. The religious architecture of institutional life is here made visible.
The set’s most striking function, however, is as a surface for Laura Warren’s projections. When Margaret delivers a lesson on the etymology of “fuck”—tracing its surprisingly complex lineage—the words appear on the wood panelling behind her. They surround the characters, becoming part of the room itself. Language, the design insists, is not just something we speak. It’s something we live inside.
Maddie Bautista’s sound design and Christine Urquhart’s costumes complete this world with precision, grounding the surreal elements in textures that feel institutional and intimate by turns.
Etymology, innuendo, and what lies beyond
Prophetess is ultimately a play about what language does. Margaret and Anne discuss the differences between etymology and innuendo. Etymology, which is Margaret’s expertise, asks how a word came to be, and what it used to mean. It’s an objective, research-based way to limit a word’s meaning to the evolutionary path that created it. Innuendo, by contrast, is what a speaker means beyond the simple words they speak. Rooted in context and tone, innuendo expands the meaning of words by adding new and temporary layers based on present circumstances.
“Am I awake?” Margaret, who has been in and out of dream since the start, asks at one point. The punning answer she receives is not reassurance, but wordplay: “You are the wokest woman I know.” The play lives in the gap between the fixed meanings of etymology and the slippery connotations of innuendo — and asks whether there’s something more powerful beyond both: words as incantation, as curse, as prophecy, and as balm.
This is heady stuff, and Payette’s direction—emotionally intense and strikingly visual—works hard to keep the abstraction of the wordplay grounded in feeling. It largely succeeds. But I can’t pretend that Prophetess is an easy watch. The show is exquisite but dense. The Shakespearean parallels, while enriching, can also obscure. And the bleeding between Margaret’s inner world and the exterior “court” of York demands continuous active attention and interpretation.
Waking up
In advance of a re-watch (which this play, I believe, would richly reward), here’s what I take from Prophetess: Margaret, at the height of her linguistic powers, is in the depths of personal despair. Etymology offers her control: the comfort of fixed origins, words pinned like specimens. But grief doesn’t allow such control. And this show is ultimately about the magic and power of language beyond the constraints of etymology and the evanescence of innuendo.
As Margaret navigates her trauma, we experience how language can exist in the world — not just as curses constraining the future, or analysis looking backwards, but as echoes, recurrences and rhythms … which can provide unexpected succor and comfort, if we’re open to hearing and receiving them.
The play begins in nightmare: spiders, darkness, a woman afraid. It ends somewhere else entirely: in full light, hard-won, with language revealed not as a cage, but as something living that flowers and dies, as we do. I won’t spoil how Ho gets us there. But Robinson’s final moments are shattering: the release that can only come after the hard work of saying and feeling has been fully done.
Prophetess is not a play that meets you halfway. It asks you to hold its wordplay, its Shakespearean echoes, and its bleeding dream-logic all in your head at once—and that’s a lot to hold. But the rewards are real: indelible performances, language that sounds and tastes like something wonderful and rare … and an unexpectedly beautiful, life-affirming vision of grief and what comes after.
Prophetess runs at Tarragon Theatre’s Mainspace (30 Bridgman Avenue, Toronto) through October 29, 2026. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
