Judith Thompson’s Queen Maeve, now on stage at Tarragon Theatre, lands with force. And in a Toronto where seniors outnumber children, and the number of seniors is expected to double by 2041, I think I’m far from alone in feeling it.
The play takes place at a seniors’ residence, which is much like the one my mother lives in. It’s the kind of in-between place where residents have the dignity of their own rooms and their own things, but they can’t handle all of their own care. Personal Support Workers (PSWs) and on-site nurses manage meals and medication, bathing and dressing, hygiene and hydration — and, crucially, get to know them in the disparate, sometimes contradictory increments they reveal.
Ken MacDonald’s lived-in set depicts the room of Mrs. Nurmi (Clare Coulter) at the facility. When someone enters through the door, a fully realized corridor is visible behind them — one just like the corridor I walk every time I visit my mother. The furniture is lived-in and a bit shabby, not institutional — as if it came originally from her home, like my mother’s did. And every square inch of available wall is covered in drawings. My one quibble is the volume of space: the stage allows this to be a bigger room than I believe you’ll ever see in such a facility.
Approaching the end of her life, Mrs. Nurmi wonders aloud why she must continue to get up in the morning. Her PSW Siobhan — a wonderful Caroline Gillis, who is variously brisk, bemused, insistent, empathetic, and ultimately tender — provides a conventional response focused on the small pleasures of the day. But this is a play about the deeper reasons for getting up: the need to reckon with what’s past, to recognize what’s buried, and to face one’s life, lineage, and imminent ending.
Enter her tortured memories, revolving around the tragic fate of beloved grandson Jake (Ryan Bommarito) and her lacerating relationship with his mother Georgia, who is also her daughter (Sarah Orenstein). These memories come to life almost magically with the benefit of John Gzowski’s evocative sound and Jason Hand’s lighting, filtered through the broad back window.
Also enter her confusion about time: what happened when, and in what sequence.
And above all, enter her alter ego: raging against the mundanity and secondariness of “Mrs. Nurmi,” she defines herself as legendary warrior Queen Maeve — the Irish-speaking, impossibly intense, sword-wielding avatar whose imagined subjects are preparing her passage to the next world.
Director Mike Payette skilfully choreographs an emotional arc and a physical vocabulary that moves from warfare to hair-washing. And the tiny-seeming Clare Coulter, who is on stage for the entire show as Mrs. Nurmi / Queen Maeve, fills the space with a vast, textured, rippling performance that is brittle, bitter, and excessively forceful … then sweet, nostalgic and even impish … and then regal and uncompromising. As she sifts her memories and accesses her warrior persona, drawings flap in the breeze. Something primal whistles through the room.
And to me, it feels heartbreaking and disarmingly true-to-life: the lashing out at well-meaning helpers, the uncensored and sometimes shocking judgments on family members, and the bonding that, almost despite herself, takes place with the practical, resilient and fundamentally caring Siobhan.
The plot is challenging to unravel as it moves backwards and forwards in time, and as we weigh the trustworthiness of Mrs. Nurmi/Maeve’s recall. And in the end, it is wickedly hard to determine the worth of this frail, yet fierce woman, who is both bully and bundle of contradictions. But when the surface reality of life is marked by incremental decline — one less thing you can do for yourself, then one more; and one more knotted-up ball of memory, then one more — there is something thrilling in the way Maeve accesses a more primal, heroic identity to force sense from it and salute the end.
My own mother is frail and in the early stages of dementia. In a less compellingly theatrical way than Clare Coulter’s Queen Maeve, she, too, contains multitudes. These include certainties about our ancestral family tree, personal experiences that she revisits routinely in well-worn grooves of conversation, leaps of logic born of angry misunderstandings about her environs, idle recriminations and breathtaking tenderness –- and above all, emotionally tangled fusions of memory and confabulation.
As her children, our role is to support her physical care through an endless list of specialist appointments and unexpected hospital visits, and to reinforce her dignity in our frequent visits to her residence. We seek to help her stay — or perhaps, with Maeve in mind, I should say to become — whole, as she labours through the final chapters of her life story.
Life is hard. Slippery, too — and the end of life especially so. Queen Maeve argues, persuasively, that what matters is the battle: the fierce work of shaping meaning and grace from unruly memory, not the tidy truth of its resolution.
Watching Coulter’s Maeve, I recognize a map for my mother—not a fact‑checked ledger, but a collage where tenderness and terror co-exist, and where a woman claims sovereignty over her story. I leave wanting to meet her where she is: to honor the queen inside the woman in the seniors’ home, and to fight, alongside her, for the small rituals, the idiosyncratic imperfections, and the great love that add up to a life worth saluting.
Queen Maeve has been extended until April 5, 2026. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
