First review from the Winnipeg run, and it’s good. Go Severn!
What makes it work as well as it does is that Thompson puts the narrative inside her heroine’s head. She comes to this new country with a completely inadequate dictionary of Indian words written by Cartier himself. By the time she meets a real native, an Inuit hunter named Itslk (Jonathan Fisher), she achieves equilibrium with him because he understands the woman’s new lexicon of dreams and visions as well as he happens to understand French.
The upshot of the play an be glibly summarized: You don’t inhabit the land; the land inhabits you.
But that would diminish the richness of the work, and especially of the character, brought to vivid life by Thompson’s performance, alternately comic, tragic, and bracingly primal.
Read the rest: Fight for survival in 1542 – Winnipeg Free Press