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written by Jen Silverman, directed by Bryn Kennedy

Riot King Art Market, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto

April 8–19, 2026

Mastiff: “Nobody ever talks to me, and I never talk to anybody. And I have so many thoughts. I stay up late at night with all my thoughts”

After last year’s acclaimed Red, Riot King Art Market returns to the Theatre Centre with The Moors, a dark comedy by American playwright Jen Silverman, whose Witch (2018) played in Toronto earlier this year. Set in a remote moorland manor, the play mocks Emily Brontë-style romanticism, exploring characters and relationships driven by emotional dependency and corrosive selfishness. Two sisters inhabit the house — the domineering and despotic Agatha (Raquel Duffy) and the capricious, childlike Huldey (Lindsey Middleton) — alongside the Maid (Erin Humphry) and a Mastiff (Jack Copland).

The story opens with the arrival of Emilie (Blessing Adedijo), a young governess presumably summoned by the master of the house to care for his child. Yet nothing in this world quite holds true. In this deserted and isolated place, the rules of time, coherence and logic seem suspended. Everything appears to have two sides, true and untrue, as words and reality fail to align. Every room in the mansion, even the bedrooms, seems indistinguishable from the parlour. The supposedly dangerous dog looks more like a cuddly lump. The Maid shifts between identities, named Margery or Mallory depending on the occasion, suffering from typhus or claiming to have a baby, whether or not she is wearing her mobcap. Even the information surrounding the master of the house is contradictory. He is said to be alive, dead or ill with syphilis, yet he never appears.

This playful instability is well conveyed by the cast’s heightened, exaggerated performances, which lean into melodrama and theatrical artifice. At times the result feels stylistically dusty. The show flirts with irony and self-awareness but rarely pushes beyond the gesture to unpack the social hierarchies and moral decay it so clearly outlines. What remains is a psychological bourgeois drama that neither the writing nor the performances seem to fully believe in.

Duffy adopts a restrained, composed register, clashing with Adedijo’s almost cartoonish diva energy. When the production fully embraces its playful register, however, the results are strongest, particularly with Lindsey Middleton. Her remarkable stage instinct makes her fearless and exuberant, fully in command of her comic timing. Unexpectedly moving, by contrast, is the Mastiff. Copland renders the animal with care and quiet depth. Dressed in a black suit like a solemn butler, he is the only figure to break the fourth wall, addressing the audience through soliloquies that are both touching and philosophically resonant. These moments offer fragile, quietly absurd sincerity within the play’s distorted world, hinting at the loneliness underlying each character’s behaviour. “Sometimes I think, who would I be if I weren’t depressed?” he wonders.

Reinforcing the true/false tension, this hyper-stylised acting finds a striking counterpoint in director Bryn Kennedy’s meticulously symmetrical set. A sofa sits at centre stage, flanked by two perfectly mirrored armchairs and small tables, while upstage two pieces of furniture (a desk and a cabinet) complete the composition. The space feels obsessively ordered, domestic in its realism, a sterile precision that evokes the nineteenth century while simultaneously suggesting something faintly suffocating. The production also introduces deliberate anachronisms, such as Huldey’s sudden entrance in a plastic raincoat, alongside musical interludes that suspend the narrative. Supposedly written for the show, these songs prove less convincing. Tentative vocals and uncertain performances briefly loosen the production’s carefully sustained atmosphere.

As the play unfolds, the longing for connection, set against the anaesthesia of solitude, emerges as the driving force behind each character. Emilie eventually discovers that the romantic correspondence she believed she had exchanged with the master of the house was written by Agatha, laying the groundwork for a queer relationship.

The dialogue is infused with dry irony that exposes the characters’ self-centred, narcissistic impulses. The Maid seeks power, Huldey craves attention, Emilie longs to be chosen and Agatha simply wants someone beside her. In the moors, isolation becomes disorienting and engulfing, and the search for intimacy gradually turns destructive.

This corrosive notion of love, closer to obsession than care, finds its clearest expression in the Mastiff’s parallel love story with a Moor-Hen (a gentle presence embodied by Heeyun Park 박희윤). What begins as tender protection soon becomes suffocating and intense. The desire for connection is one thing. But what happens when it turns into obsession? When care becomes control?

In the end, The Moors unfolds as an abstract fable hinting at the impossibility of authentic connection. Visually controlled and intermittently witty, the production remains uneven, its indulging quasi-Victorian frame blunting the sharper contemporary edge the premise would seem to imply. Yet the rhythm holds. Riot King delivers a carefully crafted staging, sustained by strong comic instincts and a clear sense of theatrical play.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Blessing Adedijo as Emilie and Raquel Duffy as Agatha; Lindsey Middleton as Huldey and Blessing Adedijo as Emilie; Heeyun Park 박희윤 as the Moor-Hen and Jack Copland as the Mastiff. © 2026 Juniper Simpson Serrano.

For tickets visit: theatrecentre.org.