In Talk Is Free Theatre’s immersive new staging of Blackbird, director Dean Deffett transforms a small, windowless office room into a crucible of guilt, trauma, and shame. The space, strewn with debris from past fast food meals, feels less like a set than a psychological holding cell. It’s a filthy environment that holds no air, no escape – and no way to tidy the emotional detritus of two people bound forever by their shared unspeakable past.
David Harrower’s acclaimed 2005 play begins when Una (Kirstyn Russelle) tracks down Ray (Cyrus Lane), the man who sexually abused her fifteen years earlier: when she was twelve and he was forty. Now in his fifties and living under a new name after serving time in prison, Ray has apparently built the semblance of a new life. Una’s sudden appearance – from within her own ostensible life – detonates it in more than 80 unrelenting minutes of confrontation and combustion.
Blackbird is likely Harrower’s best known play and has been performed all over the world. What distinguishes a production is the way it is staged. TIFT”s production succeeds on all fronts. First, Deffett’s direction capitalizes on the venue’s suffocating closeness. In a theatre, one might retreat into metaphor. But in this tight, trash-compcted room, there is literally nowhere to look but at the actors. The 20-member audience participates directly in the claustrophobia of their encounter, the air thick with accusation and memory. A single fluorescent ceiling light isolates them, forcing every shift in dynamic and every flicker of vulnerability into agonizing relief. The effect is both immersive and suffocating: an enactment of trauma’s closed loop.
The success of Blackbird hinges on the strength of its two central performances, and these two are gripping. Russelle’s Una is a raw nerve, oscillating between fury and fragility with unnerving fluidity. As she teeters between composure and volatility, her voice quickens and slows with uncanny, unnerving, and unseen thought processes. At the same time, she carries and shifts her body with the weight of someone whose life was derailed by what happened to her – and the public shame of everyone knowing it. Lane matches her intensity, yet plays against expectation: he is measured, tentative, recursive and almost banal in his self-justifications. He embodies Ray’s moral ambiguity as a man who insists on his humanity and right to move forward, even as he cannot escape or deny the harm – or the accurate name of the harm – he has done. The precision, the restraint … and the sudden, shocking eruptions are the result of the perfect confluence of Harrower’s ear for dialogue, Deffett’s adroit direction, and Russelle and Lane’s great talents.
The understated costume design by Sequoia Erickson smartly reinforces the characters’ sense of stasis and self-deception. In her floral print dress and tied-back, fringed hair, Russelle’s Una evokes a vulnerable young girl playing dress-up in heels and a purse – suspended between past and present. Lane’s rumpled business attire, meanwhile, suggests a man clinging to the illusion of reinvention. If he dresses the part of a respectable professional, perhaps his clothes will make him the man he wants desperately to be …
And the title Blackbird invites its own unsettling resonance. In Celtic and European folklore, the blackbird symbolizes both temptation and the crossing between worlds: between innocence and experience, life and its shadow. And the Beatles song Blackbird is about awakening … about broken wings learning to fly. But Harrower’s play inverts that promise. There is no flight here: only brokenness and entrapment. Yet in Una and Ray’s fraught dialogue of confession and denial, we hear an echo of that song’s yearning: the desperate need to reclaim something … even when freedom is impossible.
Deffett’s stark, immersive staging exemplifies what Talk Is Free Theatre does especially well: bold, actor-driven work that draws the audience into squirming proximity with thought-provoking material. For Blackbird offers surprises and shocks and challenges – but no release.
Instead, it clings. It lingers. Stuck to us like psychic debris that we tried to sidestep, but which adheres … and we now must figure out how to dislodge.
Blackbird runs to October 18, 2025 at Hope United Church, Toronto. Due to the play’s theme of abuse and occasional use of strong language, audiences should review the advisories before attending. Tickets are available at tift.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
