The Toronto Theatre Review: Clare Coulter Rules the Battlefield in Queen Maeve
By Ross
The walls of the room are covered from floor to ceiling with drawings. People, animals, creatures that feel both childlike and filled with longing stare out across the space like witnesses to a life that has been lived many times over. In the centre of this strange kingdom sits a hospital bed in a modest care home in Cornwall, Ontario, where dinner is served promptly at four. Yet the woman who rules this small domain insists she is no ordinary resident. She is the great Irish Warrior Queen Maeve, reborn and waiting. Outside her window, she tells us, wolves circle patiently. They will take her when the time is right.
There is something fierce and untamed beating at the heart of Judith Thompson’s new play Queen Maeve, now receiving its Toronto premiere at Tarragon Theatre. Directed with quiet intensity by Mike Payette (Tarragon/Modern Times’s Craze), the play moves like a shifting fever dream between myth and reality, asking whether the woman before us is slipping into dementia or stepping back into a life she once lived on distant battlefields. Into this room steps Siobhan, her patient caregiver and something akin to her personal lady-in-waiting. As portrayed with calm warmth by Caroline Gillis (Soulpepper’s Happy Place), she brushes Maeve’s hair, moisturizes her feet, and gently opens the curtains to let morning light spill into the room. Maeve proclaims that she wants to stay in bed, in the dark, but her lady-in-waiting gently ignores the command. Gillis grounds the play with quiet compassion, allowing the audience to hover between belief and doubt alongside her.
At the centre of the storm stands Clare Coulter in a performance that is powerful, ferocious, and deeply intriguing. Her Maeve commands the room with the authority of someone who has fought and survived countless battles, whether those battles truly happened or not. Maeve looks out beyond what Siobhan can see. Where we see trees and sunlight, she sees wolves waiting. She tells the wolves beyond the glass to wait. “Not yet,” she whispers. One moment she is regal and prophetic, speaking in mythic tones about sacred blue blood and ancient lands. The next she is a frail and frightened woman clinging to the fragments of memory that remain. Coulter (Necessary Angel’s Escaped Alone) moves between those worlds with astonishing control. Watching her is like standing close to a wild, unyielding storm that threatens to break through the walls at any moment, yet we remain rooted to the spot, unable to look away.
Chaos enters the room with the arrival of her grandson Jake, played with unsettling charm by Ryan Bommarito (Segal Center’s Indecent). From the moment he appears, there is something restless and desperate in his energy. Bommarito captures the essence of someone trying very hard to dazzle while quietly hoping and scheming for something in return. His stories sparkle with possibility, yet we sense the hook beneath them. Maeve seems to sense it as well, praising him, encouraging him, but watching carefully for the moment when the story shifts and the real request emerges. The emotional impact of their encounter cuts deep, revealing a complicated knot of love, desperation, and betrayal. And the final engagement stings, shrouded in smoke and spears, leaving us stunned and silent as we marvel at its strange mastery of mythmaking.
As Maeve’s daughter Georgia, Sarah Orenstein (Stratford’s Grand Magic) attempts to stand firm against the fury hurled in her direction. Their confrontations feel less like conversation and more like warfare, old wounds reopened with brutal precision and new ones thrust in with force, sometimes melodramatically. Hurtful accusations fly between them like spears, until even the air in the room seems thick with resentment and grief. Yet this is also where the play briefly falters. Georgia repeatedly reaches for the door, clearly ready to escape the battlefield, only to turn back. The emotional stakes are undeniable, yet the pull that keeps her returning to the battlefield of that bedroom feels less certain, draining the scenes’ authority with awkward question marks.
The production surrounds these performances with a landscape that feels both intimate and mythic. Set and costume designer Ken MacDonald (Stratford’s Frankenstein Revived) transforms the bedroom into a psychological terrain of memory and imagination, where the drawings on the walls feel like echoes of lives once lived. Jason Hand’s lighting shifts the atmosphere between the soft daylight of the bedroom and something far more dreamlike and mystical with expert precision, while John Gzowski’s sound design quietly suggests that the outside world is pressing closer with every passing moment.
The award-winning writer Judith Thompson (White Biting Dog) fills Queen Maeve with jagged and harsh emotions about motherhood, regret, addiction, and the desperate need to be forgiven before time runs out. The play occasionally loses its warrior stance as it balances its mythic imagination with its painful realism, but it never loosens its grip. By the end we have travelled through a landscape that feels chaotic, heartbreaking, and strangely beautiful. Queen Maeve may be erratic and even unsettling, but like the warrior at its centre, the play and the performances refuse to go quietly into the night. She is held, with care, by her lady-in-waiting, as Siobhan stays by her side, listening to her battle cry going quiet. And somewhere beyond that bedroom window, the wolves still wait patiently for their queen. But not for long.
