In November 1843, a sixteen-year-old girl stood trial in Toronto for murder in a sensational case that re-entered public consciousness 150 years later when it was fictionalized by Margaret Atwood. Now King Theatre Company’s gripping Canadian premiere of the play Alias Grace, adapted from Atwood’s 1996 novel by Jennifer Blackmer and directed by Iain Moggach, brings her story home to York Region, where the murders took place.
The story centres on Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant convicted in connection with the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Years into her imprisonment, Grace encounters psychiatrist Dr. Simon Jordan, who seeks through interviews to recover the memories she says she cannot access.
Atwood’s novel is based closely on Marks’ actual case. Marks was convicted of Kinnear’s murder, but her death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. The trial became a media sensation, with public opinion divided on whether Grace was a calculating young woman or a vulnerable girl who had been coerced by her co-accused, James McDermott, who was hanged. Every person who forms a judgement on her is effectively assembling a different alias – and this dynamic carries over into Moggach’s staging,
A striking staging of Grace’s story
In the show, the vast interior of Schomberg Community Hall becomes an intimate arena of scrutiny. A shallow, square red platform fills the playing area, with spectators seated in rows on three sides. On the final side, in front of a black backdrop, the actors wait in a line, seated on wooden chairs or standing. They step up onto the red platform as the narrative requires.
Moggach’s inspired design makes the audience’s position part of the drama. We surround Grace like a jury, watching and weighing what she reveals and acts out, while the other performers sit ready, until moments when their lives and stories are called into focus. The story’s constantly shifting time periods and relationships share the same uncluttered space: this is a story about storytelling, and its nonlinear movement needs imaginative freedom more than the possible constriction of fully furnished sets.
Chairs and a few simple objects establish what is necessary, while our imagination supplies the rest. Fae Smith’s costumes, Lisa Van Oorschot’s lighting and Daniel Tessy’s original score and sound design complement this spare visual world, adding atmosphere and definition without overwhelming the performances.
The actors’ choreographed movement makes the production’s fluidity especially effective. People and objects come into focus and recede as they do in memory: sometimes summoned at will, and sometimes arriving unbidden. The movement of actors from back wall to red platform gives recollection a physical language, allowing the past to intrude … rather than be antiseptically recounted. The approach realizes fully the vision Moggach sets out in his director’s note: this is a story “remembered, imagined, reconstructed, and performed.”
And with spectators visible across and around the platform, we can never forget that others are also watching and interpreting. Although we all sit in the same room, the Graces we assemble may be very different.
Performances that merit close attention
As Grace recounts her earlier life, we see the murders emerging from a personal history already marked by loss and violence. Her mother dies of illness during the voyage from Ireland to Canada. Her violent, alcoholic father sends Grace into service at fifteen, and then abandons her. Left to fend for herself, she enters households where poverty leaves female servants especially vulnerable to exploitation. Her early friendship with fellow servant Mary Whitney offers companionship … but circumstance makes that temporary.
The actors’ performances reward the close attention that the staging demands. Chloë Rose Flowers, who has handed off some of her duties as King Theatre Company’s artistic director to take the stage herself, gives Grace a strong voice and a compelling human presence, without reducing her to either helpless victim or elaborate riddle. She makes room for vulnerability, intelligence and a certain inscrutability all at the same time. As a result, we feel compassion for this woman … while wondering if we really know her.
Josh Palmer is equally persuasive as Dr. Jordan, and succeeds in making the doctor’s listening a dramatic activity in its own right. His performance gives weight to the uneasy distance between wanting to understand someone, wanting to explain them so badly that he becomes obsessed … and wanting something darker and more personal. Together, Palmer and Flowers are a magnetic duo: their encounters are the production’s linchpin.
Mira Korngold’s Nancy has one tenuous foot on the ladder of status and security through her arrangement with Kinnear (Andrew Pawarroo), and she is forever glancing over her shoulder, lest his attention shift to the younger Grace. Meanwhile, Katelyn Doyle brings both confidence and fragility to fellow servant Mary, whose circumstances have hardened her … though not so much that she ever stops yearning for friendship, romance and a stable future.
The rest of the ensemble deliver sharp turns on the red platform that colour our interpretations: José Andrés Bordas as the taciturn McDermott; Adam Brooks as the peddler Jeremiah and, later the neuro-hypnotist Dr. Jerome DuPont; and Cora Kennedy as Mrs. Rachel Lavell, whose leering, aristocratic self-interest complicates Jordan’s inquiry. Alea Carrington and Brandon James Sim complete the company as swings.
All together, the cast memorably sustain a world in which being heard and being believed are profoundly different things.
Inevitable losses … enduring questions
Given the complexity of the source, Blackmer’s achievement in adapting the play is considerable. When she wrote her novel, Atwood drew on contemporary newspaper reporting, prison records, court documents and published confessions, in order to set an archive of competing accounts against the book’s imaginative reconstruction.
The condensation of the play entails the loss of some of this richness. For instance, combining the governor’s wife and Jordan’s landlady into the character of Mrs. Lavell blurs two distinct personalities and social positions. And while Grace’s experiences make the consequences of gender inequality, trauma and poverty painfully clear, a little more exposition would shine a brighter light on the powerful historical forces at work, including prejudice against immigrants, classism, and the many means afforded men (especially rich ones) to keep women in a state of precarity. These are more than just background conditions: they determine what choices the women in the story have, and whose voice carries authority.
Even with this quibble, the act of distilling such a complex novel into approximately two hours of stage action is praiseworthy – especially given the way its chilling, ambiguous ending demonstrates the difference between hearing a story and possessing its truth. Having placed us in the position of a jury, Moggach declines to reward us with a settled verdict. Instead, we shuffle out of the hall as individuals: still carrying the question, turning over the vivid scenes and memorable performances we have witnessed, and deliberating on Grace’s culpability. Our uncertainty is both a historical provocation and a gift of inevitable, unavoidable insight into today’s fraught world.
King Theatre Company’s Alias Grace runs until November 15, 2026, at Schomberg Community Hall. Visit kingtheatre.ca for tickets.
Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
