TARRAGON THEATRE’S ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Richard Rose does a splendid job of meeting Wajdi Mouawad’s rich imagery with visions of his own, staging sequences with poetry and panache, elegantly weaving timelines and discovering wonderful opportunities to charge the stage with the raw natural tension between dry desert heat and the redemptive healing powers of water. However, as imaginative as Rose’s direction may be, and as artful as Linda Gaboriau’s translation of Mouawad’s poetic style is, the touring production of Scorched which opened Centaur Theatre’s 40th season seems to live in an ambiguous space where cultural identity is questioned.

One can hear the musicality of the original French text yearning to breakthrough, offering flashes of light during soliloquies. The actors are loaded with talent, embodying a spectrum of difficult human emotions. Yet the lack of Arab ethnicity infuses the performances with qualities all too familiar to Canadian sensibilities, failing to provide the rich and textured character of Franco-Lebanese culture.

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding theatrical experience. A celebrated Quebec talent, Wajdi Mouawad has won a General’s Award and France’s Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres. Centaur’s new artistic director Roy Surette has hit the mark with this inaugural offering, fulfilling the double helix nature of his mandate of supporting local artists – in this case Mouawad – whilst keeping the city plugged into the national current.

Read Part I: By Leonard Eichel