Knitting begins as pattern and ends as code. And that code, in its visible shape and tactile texture – as a sock, or a hat, or a scarf — serves a practical purpose. Consider it a quiet geometry of care. In the new play Spycraft, produced by A Yarn or Two Arts Collective, in association with The Theatre Centre, that geometry is bent toward resistance. And a harder question emerges: can the solace and meaning that we stitch hold firm against the chill of history?
This show’s lineage is notable. Created by Kirk Dunn and Claire Ross Dunn—the duo behind The Knitting Pilgrim, which has toured 120 times in six countries—Spycraft grows organically from their ongoing investigation into textiles as cultural text. If The Knitting Pilgrim examined faith and craft through monumental knitted triptychs, Spycraft rethreads those concerns into narrative: an intergenerational espionage tale that turns yarn (in both senses of the word) into vector and virtue.
The premise is clean and compelling. In the present day, Cleo and her daughter Sophie discover that Cleo’s grandmother Audette served in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive in Nazi-occupied France, where she exploited knitting’s rhythms and patterns to transmit critical intelligence. From there, the play braids time and place, traversing spy training rooms and village square meetings, present-day kitchens and wartime safehouses, to ask how identities are concealed, revealed, grown, and inherited. The plot turns briskly but never gratuitously. What matters most is the moral warp beneath this thriller’s weft.
The cast of four handles the tale with efficiency and aplomb. Diane Flacks is luminous as the cheerful, daring, and uber-capable Audette – and, in an elegant doubling, as her granddaughter Cleo, who is stunned by the newly declassified record of Audette’s wartime accomplishments. As Audette, Flacks charts the shift from domestic anonymity to clandestine agency, without relinquishing her warmth or idiosyncratic, energetic self. Meanwhile, as Cleo, she wrestles with the ethics of legacy: what do we celebrate, and at what cost?
Blair Williams, as Audette’s SOE handler and trainer, brings crusty and ageist male authority to the table—his arc includes his reluctant induction into the art of knitting, and he makes that pivot both funny and moving. Charlotte Dennis, as new mother Sophie, animates the contemporary thread with urgency: she’s the conscience of the present tense, pressing her family to map lessons from the past onto today’s increasingly anti-democratic times. And back in occupied France, she’s a misguided would-be mother married to a Nazi officer. Likewise, Devin Lee toggles deftly between pragmatic British ally and menacing Nazi antagonist, giving the piece its requisite friction: he embodies both wartime creativity and collaboration, and the ugliest kind of resistance.
Richard Greenblatt’s direction is brisk, character-driven, and suspenseful, weaving back and forth between generations and locales without visual clutter. The representational set designed by Nick Blais frames the playing space with baskets of yarn at the front and overhead cables that conjure larger suspended strands. Within that frame, simple chairs, tables, and a door are repeatedly repositioned to, well, knit together the story. Kirk Dunn’s knitted costumes and props carry symbolic weight without preciousness, and Heidi Chan’s sound and music design tie pulses to pattern, letting a stitch become a beat, and a beat become a heartbeat.
I was delighted by how the show delivers a genuine cliffhanger right before intermission—a pleasurable nod to spy serials that also underscores one of the play’s larger arguments: information, like yarn, is valuable only in sequence. Break the line, and you break the meaning.
And this is more broadly true of Spycraft as a whole, which is more than the simple tale of low-key, knitting-dependent espionage that the show’s setup suggests. It is, in fact, several disparate narrative strands skilfully threaded together. The first is a fascinating tutorial in female resourcefulness: the show’s lessons in the literal knitting of messages into socks and scarves are a marvel. The second is a stirring rebuke of sexism and ageism, in the form of an entertaining (if credibility-straining) female action-hero extravaganza. Here, the indomitable Audette trains as a spy, and then executes feats of daring that we are accustomed to seeing male actors like Tom Cruise or Alan Ritchson perform. The third strand is an explicit cautionary tale warning of the perils of today’s anti-democratic, antisemitic backsliding. The fourth is a complex story of identity, as Audette hides her Jewishness to protect those she loves. And the fifth strand is a paean to connection itself: knitting as a literal and figurative act that builds fabric and future.
All these strands are pulled into a single coherent and engrossing experience – though for me, Spycraft’s most bracing accomplishment is the surprising judgment Cleo pronounces right as the story closes. Jolting us, it risks unthreading our easy admiration for the heroic Audette, and pushes us forcefully back into the stakes of the present moment. See the show while you can … and consider it for yourself.
Spycraft runs until Friday, November 28, 2025 at The Theatre Centre as part of its Ontario tour. Tickets are available at theatrecentre.org.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
