(i)
find out where your body is in space.
make yourself available to what it wants to do.
follow your body where it needs to go.
begin the work you have to do.
This is the first of eight “principles for work” which greet you on a screen at center stage when you attend a performance of Jill Connell’s The Herald.
The show, produced by It Could Still Happen in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is theatre that asks what labour is, what it feels like, and how we might reimagine its value. A project worked and reworked since 2019, it arrives as a deliberately slippery provocation. It’s a formally innovative, hyper-stylized piece that evades plot, sequential time, and conventional setting – yes, all the affordances that we traditionally count on in theatre. And yet it floods the room with ideas, bodies, and sensation.
I don’t know what to make of it. But I am deeply challenged and intrigued by it. And I think that’s at least part of the point. The Herald is theatre about work and of work. It’s not easy, so we labour to make meaning of it. Paradoxically, it also asks us not to labour: to let the experience land somatically, in breath, muscle and presence.
It opens with playwright and director Jill Connell delivering a 2023 lecture that is about (among other things) actor Antonio Banderas’ pivot – in his mid-50s – to fashion school, with the express intent of bringing capes back into style.
Yes, capes.
And no, he didn’t succeed.
But the lecture insists that this “work not done” nonetheless has value, in a world of intention, choice, and being. In an afterlife of ideation and effort, the cape becomes some kind of metaphor for stored labour and storytelling, married to non-functional fashion.
This opening to The Herald is engaging and idea-rich, but fundamentally non‑dramatic: yes, it’s recursive and funny, but it feels both substantive and trivial at the exact same moment.
And then the ensemble begins to embody the show’s argument. Ideas gather weight – in the form of limbs and voices. We slip into Greek myth — most notably, that of Herakles (Greek name for Hercules) and his crushing twelve atonement-labors; and that of Jason who is assembling his Argonauts as a task force for further heroic labour.
And yet … at the same time, we are somehow right here, right now, in our world of hyper‑urgency and precarity. Herakles typifies the prison of externalized labour; of accomplishing and more accomplishing, of not knowing how (or whether) to stop, and of wrestling, like any retiree, with the question of what to do after your labours.
Meanwhile, the titular Herald, who is Herakles’ lover, describes with deadpan seriousness how he labours 24/7 … by doing pretty much nothing. In a world of influencers, the juxtaposition is absurdly funny and matter-of-factly real.
Three performers (Jackie Rowland, Rose Tuong, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) play different Herakles, and interact in succession with the Herald (William Ellis). Yet these cast members, with the addition of an earnest Fan Wu, also play themselves, staging candid reflections that fold in Simone Weil’s philosophy of labour and a meditation on being at Shoppers Drug Mart, which is a fluorescent commons where we are unmediated in our bodies … and where we could be even more so, if we chose.
As performance, The Herald is dense, poetic immersion, rather than linear narrative. It’s a communal, balletically precise interchange among choreographed movement, spoken thought, and embodied experience: hypnotic and confounding, with an ensemble that proves deeply compelling as they shift from mythic heft to wry intimacy to prosaic tactility.
And Davé’s scenography (gauzy cubes, stage mist) renders thresholds and liminality with tactile grace, while Paul Chambers and Sebastian Marziali’s lighting design and Phillip Nozuka’s arresting music and sound design punch up the Heraklean drama, and deftly navigate the multiple – and radical – tonal shifts.
Just on the off chance that this is not yet clear, let me state it: The Herald is deeply weird and definitely not for everyone. I don’t “get” it in any traditional sense (for instance, why are there three different Herakles? What does the descent we watch into the underworld mean?). If you are impatient for meaning, you will be frustrated.
And yet…
This show had an uncanny ability to slip between my confounded synapses with visceral flashes of insight: about Shoppers as a place where we can simply be; about my own life’s “labours”, and the possibility or impossibility or misguided conception of a time to come “after” them; and about capes as a deliciously non-functional representation of actual work done and aspirational work not done.
If I’m being honest, my overall confusion feels more like a feature than a bug of this show that wears its manifesto energy like a badge. Those “principles for work” emblazoned on the screen at the start of the show are profound and poetic. For me, they speak eloquently to how we can most effectively be in this show’s audience … and how we can most effectively labour (and not labour) in our lives.
(viii)
Remember why you’re here.
Return and recommit to the labour.
Don’t follow more rules than you need to.
Know by going.
That last line? If this all doesn’t sound too maddening to you … it’s your invitation.
The Herald runs until March 14, 2026 (85 minutes, no intermission). Tickets are available atbuddiesinbadtimes.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
