✭✭✭✭✩

devised by the Ensemble, directed by Kelly Straughan

Seventh Stage Theatre Productions, Next Stage Festival, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

January 7-17, 2010

The “Red Queen Effect” is running as fast as you can to stay in the same place because the landscape around you is moving, as the Red Queen tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.  Seventh Stage’s highly inventive, large cast piece combines verbal and physical theatre to stunning effect to depict the male-dominated, looking-glass world of high finance as the ambitious Alice (Monica Dottor) tries to negotiate its multiple absurdities, especially as embodied in the jokingly repressive Humpty Dumpty figure of co-worker Travis (Ted Hallett).  The show loses some of its punch in the second half, but the sustained satire of the business world, marked by clever precision choreography for the male workers, is both funny and impressive.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-01-08.

Photo: Monica Dottor and cast of The Red Queen Effect. ©Michelle Bailey.