George F. Walker is Canada’s most prolific living playwright. For five decades, he has been wiring explosive charges beneath comfortable assumptions — about family, about justice, and about who deserves help and who gets it. Recent works like Girls Unwanted and Syndrome detonated with a gritty and grounded intensity.
These plays granted the audience bystander status: we were present for the trauma and urban wreckage, but safely detached from it. World On Fire, presented by World On Fire Theatre Collective at The Assembly Theatre, revokes that privilege. It never lets us settle into the safety and certainties of Walker’s trademark realism. Instead, it serves up something stranger, funnier, and more unsettling — an immersive provocation that destabilizes the frame until we’re squirming in our seats … not quite sure exactly where we stand, but feeling uncomfortably like we’ve been seen.
We cold open with Marline Yan’s Annie looking us directly in the eye and accusing us of not giving a damn about her harrowing street kid backstory. It feels like one of those hard-hitting Covenant House ads that are visceral and impossible to dismiss. Then the play pivots to become Jules’ story. Elizabeth Friesen’s overwhelmed social worker is the connector, working with Annie and a rotating cast of damaged souls who enter and exit, and come to sit in a circle of chairs arranged like a group therapy session. The combative, foul-mouthed Annie has been on the streets since she was 13. The live-wire Casey (a wonderfully off-kilter Anne van Leeuwen) is another street kid with a markedly different attitude and backstory. David (David Huband) survived his parents’ attempted murder-suicide and has carried the weight for decades. Marius (Chris Peterson) is a fragile soul trying to survive in a world that he doesn’t trust. And Dr. Emilio (Alex Clay) is, as the program describes, “a charmer with a prescription pad.”
From the very start, it’s not clear where we are. As the neurotic David unpacks his despair, Jules lets fly ironic, cutting asides which feel inappropriate and even prompt him to wonder who she’s talking to. It sure feels like she’s talking to us in the audience — though we can’t quite be sure. Other characters, too, will sometimes see, and yet not see us … in a funhouse mirror version of the way Annie accused us of seeing, but not seeing, her.
It’s unnerving. And this instability makes World On Fire unusually funny for a Walker play, though nearly every time we laugh, we regret it. Our mirth is ironic and dark, rooted in the absurdity of a character’s self-image or belligerence … which arises from terrible situations that stubbornly resist certainty and confidence. Annie’s babies, David’s deathwish, and Casey’s dire backstory mixed with cheerful activism: how much of these is real? How much is performative or imagined? It’s very hard to say.
Peterson’s Marius is a special standout. Rushing and rocking and gripping his head, he deploys his distrust of all seeming consistency to become an unlikely vessel for the play’s tentative hope. Meanwhile, Clay’s Dr. Emilio is a curious figure. He initially seems transplanted from the medical establishment-endorsing intensity of a show like The Pitt. But he turns into a figure of ridicule, with his puppydog eagerness to throw drugs at trauma. The production’s poster shows a multi-coloured pile of pills, and the spirals experienced by these characters are strongly influenced by medication: another unstable element that can be treatment, but can also be the symptom or the disease.
Walker’s direction steadily accelerates these individuals through their overlapping crises. The characters talk over one another like children pestering a teacher. They disappear into their own problems, and then emerge to compete with one another. Madeleine Rosenberg’s set — a space of meeting whose backdrop is a series of black-and-white images referencing the interconnection of mind and world — situates the chaos beautifully.
And chaos it is. The collective trauma builds in an experience that is noisy, fast, and overwhelming. Like flames engulfing kindling, the conflagration referenced in the play’s title consumes the room. This world is very much on fire.
I won’t spoil the ending, but green shoots do emerge from the ash of this overwhelming chaos — spawned by Jules’ last-ditch decision to bring the group together.
Annie accused us of not giving a damn at the start. World On Fire feels like shock therapy — an act of uncontrolled incineration designed to jolt us out of complacency. To prompt us to be curious. To empathize with the misfits around us.
The ending asks us if, in a world on fire, we still don’t give a damn… and leaves us silence to prove that we do.
World On Fire runs at The Assembly Theatre through June 7, 2026. Tickets are available at eventbrite.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
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