Watching Sleuth is a bit like trying to keep your eye on the ball a hustler has hidden under one of three fast-moving cups. You’re certain you know where it is, right up until the cups stop moving.
But are you right?
Shaw Festival’s production of Anthony Shaffer’s two-handed thriller has now made the trip from Niagara-on-the-Lake to The Fleck at Harbourfront Centre, as the first production in Shaw’s new multi-year residency on Toronto’s waterfront. It’s a smart and stylish start.
Shaffer’s play has kept audiences on the edge of their seats for generations. It premiered on Broadway in 1970 and won the Tony for Best Play. Two film versions followed. In the 1972 version, Michael Caine played Milo opposite Laurence Olivier’s Wyke, and both actors received Academy Award nominations. In the 2007 remake, directed by Kenneth Branagh, Caine took on Wyke, opposite Jude Law as Tindle.
In whatever form it takes, the story begins with young travel agent Milo Tindle arriving at the extensive country manor of the reclusive Andrew Wyke, a best-selling mystery novelist. Tindle hopes to talk about marrying Wyke’s estranged wife, Marguerite. Wyke is not only supportive of this plan but offers Milo a way to make some quick money, in order to maintain her lavish lifestyle. They will stage a robbery of Marguerite’s jewellery for the insurance money. This is the start of an intricate game of cat-and-mouse in which the protagonists work overtime to gain the upper hand (paw?).
Wyke’s motive is more personal than financial. He boasts of being “an Olympic sexual athlete,” but the bluster covers his impotence. “The shortest way to a man’s heart is through humiliation,” he contends. This game is his revenge, and Milo is his target. Patrick Galligan is an utter delight as Wyke, oozing with the smug, blustery self-satisfaction of a rich man who is confident he’s the cleverest in the room, and knows how to bluff when he doesn’t understand what’s going on. Galligan finds both Wyke’s relish in the game and his deep sense of menace –and maps the transitions and overlaps without losing the character’s internal logic.
As it happens, I was lucky enough to see Galligan duel two different opponents. At the Shaw, I caught understudy Savion Roach as Milo Tindle: he found both intelligence and wounded dignity in the younger man. Here, I saw Sepehr Reybod. His wary Tindle warms quickly to Wyke’s proposition … then later makes himself a formidable adversary.
This production suits The Fleck. The set looks snug and complete, exactly as it did in the Shaw’s intimate Court House Theatre. Sim Suzer’s period details underscore Wyke’s vanity, including his collection of curiosities, led by life-sized animatronic ventriloquist dummy Jack Tar. The checkerboard floor and coffee table hint at Wyke as a consummate game player, and the wall-to-ceiling bookshelves and antique furniture establish him as a learned, showy and conceited man. John Gzowski’s sound, Joyce Padua’s costumes and Mikael Kangas’s lighting create the feeling that we are spying the action in Wyke’s drawing room through his window.
The play’s main challenge is that it unfolds in a single room, driven by dense and rapid-fire dialogue which could easily feel static. For this reason, Director Peter Fernandes places his actors in near-constant motion, through everything from pratfalls, fights and property destruction to Wyke’s energetic dramatizations of excerpts from his mystery novels. Add in some well-placed gunshots and even an explosion, and there’s a lot going on. Yet the walls never disappear … and we can’t help but feel trapped inside them. It’s a difficult duality to conjure, and Fernandes achieves it smartly. His Sleuth remains relentlessly sinister.
My balcony seat showed me that the Toronto audience was enthralled with the production at every step. When a major twist landed exquisitely, I wondered if the audience was mostly first-timers at a production of Sleuth: either way, it was delightful to hear the house gasp audibly.
So go into Sleuth with your eyes open, and keep them trained tightly on the ball, as it passes back and forth between the principals. You, too, may gasp — and you will certainly marvel at where it ends up, and how skillfully this team from across Lake Ontario gets it there.
Sleuth plays The Fleck at Harbourfront Centre Theatre until November 1, 2026. The Shaw’s perennial holiday favourite A Christmas Carol follows from November 12 to December 23, 2026. Tickets are available at harbourfrontcentre.com
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
