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by Nicolas Billon, directed by Matt White

Green Lights Arts with Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto

February 26–March 15, 2026;

Conrad Centre, Kitchener

March 18-29, 2026

Simon: “There are no secrets in this family”

Green Lights Arts of Kitchener with Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre is currently presenting the North American premiere of The Neighbours by Nicolas Billon. The 2019 play examines where guilt and complicity lie in a community affected by an horrendous crime. Director Matt White draws riveting performances from the cast as the tone shifts from comedy to alarm.

In his Playwright’s Note, Billon states that “The Neighbours continues my exploration of direct address, of having characters speak directly to you. I firmly believe theatre must be a conversation – one-sided, granted, but one that acknowledges your presence and recognizes that you are here”. Billon began this exploration what is called “presentational theatre” as early as his play Iceland (2012), in which three characters directly address the audience in an effort to convince us that they have nothing to do with a body found in an apartment building.

In The Neighbours we meet the happily married middle-aged couple Simon and Denise Armstrong who live quiet, ordinary lives on Stanley Court, a street in a suburb of some American city. (Except for a reference to the electric chair as capital punishment, the action could just as well take place in Canada.)

Kelly Wolf’s minimalist set conveys both the naturalistic and non-naturalistic aspects of Billon’s play. The cheap armchair where Simon parks himself could be chosen from any used furniture depot as is the case with all the few pieces of furniture on the bare stage. The stage floor represents a map of the neighbourhood with a few street names, lots of house numbers and a square of light courtesy of designer Paul Cegys that picks out the house which has become the centre of all the neighbours’ attention. Above the stage hang miniature fragments of parts of a suburban house.

The play begins after the actor playing Simon enters, takes his seat and snores loudly through the House Manager’s reading of the Land Acknowledgement and the housekeeping rules. Simon’s rudeness is an introduction to a character who may know what politeness and political correctness are even if he doesn’t practice them. The fact that Simon, a White man, gestures to Denise, a Black woman, to indicate that he is “woke” only has the opposite effect, as if he regarded Denise as some kind of prop.

Unlike Iceland, which consisted only of monologues, Denise and Simon address us together to tell us the story of the terrible events that took place in their neighbourhood. The conceit is that they are speaking to us now while they are waiting for their daughter Sophie to arrive from California. Why the couple should want to tell their tale to a roomful of strangers is one of the mysteries of presentational theatre that highlights the artifice of play at the same time as it revels in the realistic details of the story.

As we slowly discover, the terrible event that has happened in Stanley Court was that the Armstrongs’ neighbour kidnapped a schoolgirl and held her captive in his home for 12 years. Only seven months ago she escaped along with the daughter she had had by her captor. Billon is thus alluding to a situation depicted in a novel like Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), which was later made into a film in 2015 and a stage play in 2017. Billon’s questions are “What was is like to be the neighbour of such a man?” and “Did you really not realize anything unusual was happening right next door?” As we learn, these are among the questions that the Armstrongs along with all the other neighbours were asked in the aftermath of the woman’s escape and her captor’s death.

Billon has Denise and Simon tell their story in almost a choral manner – completing each other’s sentences, filling in details, correcting each other, commenting on each other’s remarks. This process begins in almost a comic fashion as the two seem unable to separate the trivial from the essential. Gradually, however, details emerge that don’t quite accord with the Armstrongs’ self-portrayal as innocent bystanders.

Under Matt White’s taut direction, Tony Nappo and Ordena Stephens-Thompson give such natural performances as Simon and Denise that despite the inherent metatheatricality of Billon’s presentational approach, I found myself responding to them as if they were really the couple they were playing. Nappo plays Simon as a nice-enough slob who seems to be drinking rather a lot of beer in the space of only 80 minutes.

Although Simon is apparently proud of the annual neighbourhood barbecue he hosts, Nappo indicates that Simon can also not refrain from satirizing everyone who attends. Simon innocently wonders why fewer neighbours have been attending, but we see that Simon must not be as able to hide his ironic view of his neighbours as well as he thinks. Although Simon proudly asserts that “There are no secrets in this family”, we find that this hapless fellow is no good at hiding those secrets either. Denise assures us that under all of Simon’s “bravado” there is an essentially good man, but Nappo masterfully demonstrates that under Simon’s bravado lies a man tortured by his own cowardice.

Ordena Stephens-Thompson is wonderfully, warm, kind and intelligent as Denise, who may seem more emotional than Simon but who, in fact, has a firmer, more rational grip on reality than Simon does. As the action proceeds, Stephens-Thompson makes clear that it is Denise who really holds the couple together despite her appearance of so frequently deferring to Simon for information. Stephens-Thompson makes Denise’s realizations and her transformation at the conclusion extraordinarily powerful.

More than once, Billon has Denise quote Sophie that Denise is trapped in an unhappy marriage. If that is so, neither White nor Nappo and Stephens-Thompson do anything to support this idea. Billon is trying to create a parallel between the Armstrongs and the kidnapper and victim next door, but either the acting and direction should support Sophie’s statements or those statements should be omitted.

A major peculiarity of The Neighbours is the presence of one of the Armstrongs’ neighbours sitting silently on stage for almost the entire duration of the action. This is actor Richard Tse playing the role of Au Yeung Wei, a quiet man of Chinese heritage whom Simon thinks must be gay. Throughout almost the entire 80 minutes, Au Yeung does nothing but sit in a chair and read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, turning pages while sipping tea. Eventually, we learn that Au Yeung is a performance artist who specializes in durational performances. One performance that the Armstrongs saw featured a puppet who did nothing but sit in a chair reading, turning pages while sipping tea.

This is obviously some kind of metatheatrical joke, but it is a pity it requires an actor to do and say next to nothing while two other actors on stage speak nonstop. From the point of view of staging, it is especially bad that Billon and White have confined the Armstrongs to the stage left half of the playing area and given Au Yeung the entire half of stage right where he does the little he is assigned. This means that in the Tarragon Extraspace audience members on the house left side of the aisle will be at a disadvantage when watching the play, a disadvantage that is worse the closer they are to the front. Who knows how the play will be staged when it travels to the Conrad Centre in Kitchener after its run at the Tarragon, but it would be much better to place the Armstrongs centre-stage and place Au Yeung in the distance somewhere behind them, perhaps lit up behind a scrim.

Though first produced in Tokyo in 2019, The Neighbours seems even more relevant in North America today where people — some unconsciously, some intentionally — avoid putting facts together because the result will be too embarrassing or disturbing to handle. Billon suggests there is no such thing as an innocent bystander: someone aware of a crime who does nothing to stop it is also complicit.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Ordena Stephens-Thompson as Denise and Tony Nappo as Simon; Richard Tse as Au Yeung Wei, Tony Nappo as Simon and Ordena Stephens-Thompson as Denise; Ordena Stephens-Thompson as Denise and Tony Nappo as Simon. © 2026 Jae Yang.

For tickets visit: tarragontheatre.com or www.greenlight-arts.com.