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by Kanika Ambrose, directed by Sabryn Rock

Necessary Angel Theatre Company with Canadian Stage and Tarragon Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto

November 25, 2025-December 14, 2026

Lyle: “I got to get some adventure”

Moonlight Schooner is the second play by Kanika Ambrose after The Christmas Market to have its world premiere this month. Strangely, for a playwright who wrote the clearly plotted our place of 2022, Moonlight Schooner feels unfocussed as if Ambrose could not decide which of several possible stories she wanted to tell. The cast gives uniformly excellent performances, but on the night I attended the audience seemed to be as unsure as I was whether the meandering play had actually ended.

The story in general concerns three Caribbean sailors – Shabine, Timothy and Vincy – whose ship “Moonlight Schooner” runs aground on the island of St. Kitts during a storm on the eve of May 5, 1958. While his mother is away, Lyle, a young man who lives in a big house, gives the sailors shelter. The following day the sailors plan to repair their ship only to realize that it is May Day and all the stores are closed. Given this enforced leisure time, the three decide to enjoy themselves. In terms of plot, this is all there is.

The play is really a group portrait of the three sailors and Lyle. The sailor we first meet is Shabine (Jamie Robinson), the oldest of the four. He is married with children and he dedicates his life to providing for them. He also has a relationship with another woman, about which Timothy razzes him. Shabine’s name comes from the French chabin, meaning a sheep-goat hybrid and in slang a man of African descent with light skin. Vincy says that Shabine could pass for white and wonders why he doesn’t have a better job. Ambrose never gives us an answer.

Shabine previous job was running scotch until his White boss cheated him out of his wages. Shabine, himself, refuses to drink alcohol because he is aware of the Triangular Trade in which liquor from England would be traded for slaves in Africa to be sent to work in the Americas. The oldest and most educated of the four, Shabine can quote Shakespeare and writes poetry about his wife in a notebook.

Robinson makes Shabine the most sensible and sensitive of the four male characters. Shabine is the one who tries to regulate the bad behaviour of the others although Robinson shows that Shabine, in his generally melancholy mood, knows that there is little he can do.

Ambrose leads us to believe that Shabine is the play’s main character both because he the most articulate and because he is the only one who is granted flashbacks of his past. Unfortunately, these flashbacks do nothing but show us that Shabine has a wife and children, something which he has already told us.

The next oldest character is Timothy (Daren A. Herbert), a man completely unlike Shabine. Herbert plays Timothy as a thorough ne’er-do-well, happy to spend his free time drinking and whoring and unscrupulous enough to encourage the young Vincy, whom Shabine tries to protect, to do so too. Despite his dubious nature, Timothy gives us the best summary of how British colonialism affected the Caribbean. Timothy tells us that he was once a farmer and made a good living at it. But at some point, Britain decided to pay colonial farmers half of what it used to do. As a result, farmers could no longer feed their own families and had to seek other means.

Various characters mention that one way to make money is to work in England. This should signal us that Ambrose is writing about the Windrush generation. They were people from that British Caribbean colonies who, as British citizens, were encouraged from 1948 on to come to England after World War II to help rebuild the country. However, in 2018 the British government began denying these immigrants legal rights including the right to remain and even deported some of them.

Besides Timothy, Herbert plays several other characters including Shabine’s wife Maria in the flashbacks and one half of a calypso duo. While it is great that Herbert has a chance to demonstrate his range, neither of these characters is actually important to the story, although the two calypso songs are a welcome relief from the generally downbeat mood of the play.

The third sailor, Vincy (danjelani ellis), is an adolescent. Everything about the life of a sailor is new to him. While Shabine tries to protect him, Timothy is glad to lead him into temptation. ellis perfectly captures Vincy’s combination of innocence and recklessness and is the main source of comedy in the play since Vincy seems unwilling to learn from his mistakes.

The fourth male role is that of Lyle, a young man whose mother Janine seeks to protect from the corrupting influences of the world. Though Lyle is not as out of control as Vincy, he admires the sailors for leading the kind of exciting life that is totally contrary to the staid future that his mother has planned for him. Even before Lyle says outright that he’d like some adventure, Tony Ofori has shown through Lyle’s facial expressions and manner of speaking how torn Lyle is between staying with what is known and secure and venturing out to what is unknown and new. Ofori also plays Shabine’s enthusiastic son and is the other half of the calypso duo.

The play has only one female actor and that is Nehassaiu deGannes as Lyle’s mother Janine. It is a very small role – only two short scenes – but deGannes makes Janine come alive as a vital counterpoint to the otherwise all-male world of the play. DeGannes plays Janine as almost comically refined and completely unaware of how Lyle seems to cringe under his mother’s babying. Janine’s husband has been in England for some time and Janine is proud of all that his money has enabled her to do like owning land and having a large house with a fine view. The fact that he is absent seems not to trouble the oh-so-proper Janine at all.

The oddest aspect of the role of Janine is having to speak to the unseen woman that Timothy has brought back from the city. DeGannes does this sensitively, revealing that Janine only gradually understands why the woman might be in her house. Yet, the dialogue with the unseen woman is so lengthy, one wonders why Ambrose does not make it a full-fledged part for another actor.

While learning about the backgrounds of the four men is all very interesting, painting portraits is not dramatic. There is no conflict. Timothy and Shabine get into fights twice over Timothy’s mocking of Shabine’s wife, but these minor scrapes soon die down. The only real conflict in the play has to do with Lyle. We wonder whether he will or will not stay home with his mother and lead the safe life she has planned for him. Because of this, the focus of the play that initially was on Shabine shifts to Lyle. The dramatic scene we expect is a confrontation between Janine and Lyle, but Ambrose never provides one, leaving us with a weak ending where the characters confront none of the important issues Ambrose has raised.

Shannon Lea Doyle swooping set is probably meant to invoke both the waves of the sea and the ship sailing on them. As a ship it has some dubious rigging, except when it serves as a clothesline. The set is much less effective at suggesting the large house where Lyle and Janine live, an inner room entered as it is through a door without a frame. Raha Javanfar’s lighting creates a fine storm at the beginning and reinforces the changes of mood throughout the action. Des'ree Gray’s costumes bring out the personality of each character, especially the dainty prints for Janine’s delicate nature.

A 100-minute-long play depicting people doing nothing in particular is not really a powerful way to help us understand the Windrush scandal that appears to have motivated Ambrose to write the play. A play without conflict is also not a productive way to engage us with the characters or what they believe. We can understand Ambrose’s focus on Shabine as a poet, but what little plot there is points to Lyle as the character most likely to have a fundamental conflict with another character. Under Sabryn Rock’s direction the cast gives praiseworthy performances. Yet the play needs substantial rethinking if Ambrose wants its subject matter to have any impact.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Tony Ofori as Lyle, Daren A. Herbert as Timothy, Jamie Robinson as Shabine and danjelani ellis as Vincy; Daren A. Herbert as Timothy, Tony Ofori as Lyle, Jamie Robinson as Shabine and danjelani ellis as Vincy; Nehassaiu deGannes as Janine and Tony Ofori as Lyle. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.