The Herald

(Originally published for Stage Door)

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre has been reconfigured like a Greek theatre, with the audience seated on three sides of the room and an orchestra-like playing space at the centre. There, five performers stand unaware of our presence, facing different directions with their eyes shut. They are at Shoppers Drug Mart. Each voices an internal monologue describing the bodily sensations of this mundane visit to the store: sweat, soreness, tiredness, heaviness.

This attention to the body lies at the heart of The Herald, the new work by theatre-maker Jill Connell, produced by Buddies in collaboration with It Can Still Happen Theatre. Connell, who has a background in both dance and theatre, is interested in what happens when performers and spectators become acutely aware of their own bodies during a performance, an approach reminiscent of what theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte termed the “performative turn”.

The show begins with the playwright herself standing behind a music stand and delivering a lecture. A projection reveals that it is an actual talk she gave in 2023. She opens with an anecdote about actor Antonio Banderas enrolling in a fashion-design course in order to pursue his dream of making capes. The whimsical detail soon reveals the play’s central concern: the distinction between working and doing. Work belongs to systems of productivity and economic value. Doing, by contrast, is something more elemental, the simple activities through which the body exists: breathing, moving, thinking.

From this premise, The Herald unfolds across three different realms: the lecture hall, the fluorescent aisles of a shop and, most prominently, a mythic landscape drawn from ancient Greece. In this strand we encounter Heracles, embodied by different performers at different moments. The hero has already completed eleven labours and now faces the final one, yet he finds himself paralysed by the prospect of finishing. What happens after the last task? What remains once productivity ends?

Opposite him stands the enigmatic Herald, played with quiet intensity by William Ellis. While Heracles wrestles with the logic of heroic achievement, the Herald retreats to a small transparent room at the centre of the stage, patiently working on an artistic gesture: sewing a cape. Inside these white walls of semi-transparent sheets, the two characters engage in a philosophical debate, a confrontation between action and productivity, creation and obligation.

Connell’s writing unfolds like a stream-of-consciousness reflection, mixing symbolism, sarcasm, and intellectual digression. At one point it even invokes the French philosopher Simone Weil, who observed that industrial labour forced workers into a passive, machine-like existence. The result is playful and often intriguing, yet it frequently becomes so elliptical that the audience struggles to follow the line of reasoning.

The production’s aesthetic choices sometimes heighten this sense of uncertainty. Performances feel tentative, as if the cast are still searching for the rhythm of the piece. The costumes (a riot of desert-patterned crop tops, tight shorts, and mock-heroic royal capes) attempt to combine contrasting visual registers but ultimately feel oddly mismatched.

Yet even when it falters, The Herald’s ambition is worth acknowledging. Connell is asking large questions about theatre, labour, and attention, proposing a form of performance less concerned with entertainment than with reflection. In fact, almost nothing happens on stage. The drama is built almost entirely from tension. We see Heracles hesitating to complete his final labour. A promotional-style video invites us to join Jason and the Argonauts on their quest. At the end, the Herald struggles to decide whether to descend into Hades, which would be Heracles’ final labour: has he ultimately become the Greek hero and finally taken action?

Connell’s work ultimately challenges the expectations we bring to theatre: there is no conventional dramaturgical arc or tidy resolution. What remains instead is a process unfolding before us: bodies thinking, hesitating, and debating ideas. The Herald may be messy and occasionally opaque, but its refusal to become a finished “product” is also what makes it an intriguing theatrical provocation.