With its deliberate pacing and creeping sense of dread, the Shaw Festival’s Wait Until Dark has the look and feel of a vintage thriller. Its old-school suspense is painstakingly built: like Frederick Knott’s original play, which spawned the 1967 Audrey Hepburn film, Wait Until Dark takes a decidedly slow-burn approach. But when the wire of dramatic tension snaps fully taut in the second act, the resulting jolt justifies the wait.
The story centres on Susan Hendrix, a young woman recently blinded in a car accident, who finds herself targeted by men searching for a mysterious doll filled with smuggled diamonds. Left alone in her Greenwich Village basement apartment while her husband is away, Susan must rely on her instincts, plus her sharpened other senses, to pierce layers of deception, and escape peril that has penetrated her apartment.
Sochi Fried steps into the role as Susan with quiet power, transforming even the most exposition-heavy moments into compelling drama. Her Susan is no shrinking violet: her enhanced senses, quick wit, and growing suspicion become potent tools as the search for a missing doll turns increasingly sinister. There’s a wonderfully subtle deliberation to her movements – tapping on the furniture as she moves through the cramped basement apartment, feeling a step with her foot before stepping up — that lends credibility. And she is transfixing in moments of dawning awareness that something is amiss, in moments where she evinces or masks her mounting fear, and in her final, strategic stand.
The ensemble cast around Fried is uniformly strong. Kristopher Bowman’s Mike exudes a plausible warmth and protectiveness as the old army friend of Susan’s husband. In his hat and trench coat, Martin Happer’s Carlino, the faux police sergeant, embodies an inspector from a 1940s black-and-white movie. Meanwhile, Bruce Horak’s shift from the ostensibly distraught husband Roat to the genuine threat he is revealed to be is truly menacing. Meanwhile, Eponine Lee shines as young Gloria, the young upstairs neighbour paid to look in on Susan. Gloria’s relationship with Susan is fraught with tension. Susan resents being treated as helpless, and Gloria is initially petulant and defiant in response. The pair’s interactions provide necessary moments of sharp comic relief, and as danger escalates, their bond believably strengthens, adding a touching emotional layer to the story.
Under Sanjay Talwar’s direction, the production successfully achieves a hushed simmer of mounting dread. As Talwar mentions in his Director’s Notes, Wait Until Dark is about fear devoid of spectacle and accruing in “tension, timing and trust”. In a play about a blind person’s fear, light and shadow – with all their associated implications – are critical elements. And indeed, Louise Guinand’s moody lighting does wonderful work that helps us sympathize with Susan’s terror: casting long shadows across the confined space, and at just the right moments, plunging the space into absolute darkness. Meanwhile, John Gzowski’s immersive soundscape layers in the persistent sounds of the city with the sounds of the phone, the Venetian blinds, the clatter of dropped or thrown items … and moments of ominous silence. All of these combine together into a pivotal moment in the second half, when Susan sits at her kitchen table, waiting for what she knows is coming.
The elaborate apartment set, designed in meticulous detail by Lorenzo Savoini, is packed with functional props and pieces – lights, fridge, scuffed stairs, working faucet and blinds – all built to heighten the stakes in every scene. Ming Wong’s period costumes ground us in 1944, a choice that increases the plausibility of the bad guys’ focus on knives and brass knuckles over guns, while Geoff Scovell’s fight choreography tightens the final confrontation into a hold-your-breath, edge-of-our-seats climax.
Jeffrey Hatcher’s revision of Frederick Knott’s original script smooths out some of its jagged edges: for example, by replacing heroin with diamonds, and tightening the pacing. Still, the dramaturgy remains creaky at times, especially in the dialogue-heavy first act. The play indulges in elaborate tricks—Venetian blind signals, telephone fake-outs, and red herrings galore—that feel a touch overwrought and in some cases unnecessary, given that classic suspense devices are already at work here. For instance, the opening scene ensures that the audience knows more than Susan does (leaving her in the dark, if you will), and this dramatic irony heightens our anxiety as we watch her inch closer to danger.
And some decisions strain credibility – in the same way they almost always do in thrillers. At certain moments, I wanted to shout at Susan to lock her door. And why, in a moment of crisis, does she send Gloria to the train station to meet her husband – instead of directly to the police? To serve the plot and build the suspense, of course. But of course, that’s part of the genre’s charm. And Wait Until Dark is less concerned with airtight realism than with creating a charged, claustrophobic space where danger brews within the sanctity of home. And despite its talky stretches and sometimes dated mechanics, the story delivers on its promise. The slow build pays off handsomely in a final sequence that is tense, visually striking, and viscerally satisfying.
Ultimately, the biggest reason to see this Wait Until Dark is Fried. Her performance brings dimension and clarity to what could easily become a paint-by-numbers thriller. Through an understated performance, she reveals how survival instincts emerge from vulnerability—and how darkness can clarify rather than obscure, uncovering what someone is truly capable of, especially when no one’s watching.
The Shaw Festival’s Wait Until Dark continues at the Festival Theatre until October 5, 2025. Tickets are available on shawfest.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
