New Play Development

The Life Inside

In 2009, The Belfry Theatre commissioned James Fagan Tait and Joelysa Pankanea to create an exciting, large-scale piece of music theatre.  This unique project, titled The Life Inside, uses Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 play Intérieur as the foundation for a piece of theatre unlike anything seen before in Victoria.

Maeterlinck’s play is a meditation on life and death.  The simple story focuses on an old man who must deliver news of a young girl’s death to her family, the owners of the estate on which he lives.  The old man can see the family through the windows of their home.  As seen from the outside looking in, the family is unaware of any cause for concern.  As the townsfolk approach with the child’s body, the old man waivers in his resolve to convey the tragic news.

In conversation with the stranger who discovered the child in the river, the old man ruminates on this death, all death, and ultimately life itself.  The old man’s granddaughters push him to relay the news, which the audience sees him do, in the silence of the interior world beyond the windows of the home.

As the characters outside of the house look into the life inside, the audience is one more step removed – voyeurs watching voyeurs.  The tension, then, comes from the audience’s knowledge of the terrible event, while observing the people most implicated in it, carrying on with their life, oblivious to the tragedy that has already befallen them.  The themes of life and death are more profound and more profoundly experienced because of Maeterlinck’s unusual conceit.

Writer and director James Fagan Tait has evolved an approach to theatre that has been influenced by the work of French theatre artists Ariane Mnouchkine and Jaques Le Coq.   To what he has absorbed from their practices, he has then added the elements of music and storytelling.  Tait manages to create work that is cinematic and theatrical at the same time; removing all artifice from the performances, while stylizing the music and movement.   Composer Joelysa Pankanea, Tait’s long-time collaborator, writes music that enters your soul – part world music, part new/minimalist music, reminiscent of Philip Glass.  Most closely associated with their astounding, award-winning adaptation of Crime and Punishment, their work blurs the line between song, dance and text, while examining the human experience in theatre.

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Taking it Off

A hilarious new play that gets right to the bottom of our culture’s obsession with fat.  This work-in-progress takes a comedic look at one woman’s battle with her bulge, her beliefs, and her newly skinny best friend, as she discovers that losing weight may mean losing more than pounds.

Deb Williams is one of the creator/stars of the international smash hit comedies Mom’s the Word, Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged and Mom’s the Word: Remixed. Deb was recently seen on stage in Ruby Slipper’s award-winning Lifesavers.  She is a writer, and comedian who works regularly for CBC TV and radio and can be found mouthing off on rantingparent.com.  Deb has recently co-written and co-stared in the TV pilot, Ask an Expert. She has written two hit shows for Axis Theatre, and Wince and The Stay Fresh Special with Alison Kelly. She is a graduate of Studio 58 and has worked in the arts for the past 25 years. Deb is a Half Baked Wife, Feeble Friend, and Mediocre Mother of two fabulous people.

Michele Riml is a critically acclaimed playwright from Vancouver. She is the author of the hit Sexy Laundry; which has been produced extensively across Canada, and will take the stage at The Grand Theatre in Ontario and internationally this year. Her newest play about love and advertising, Poster Boys premiered at Granville Island Stage in The Arts Club’s 2007/08 season. Her play Souvenirs, about a father daughter relationship and addiction, was produced by Green Thumb Theatre for Young People in 2008. Her play RAGE won the 2005 Sydney Risk prize for Outstanding Original Play as well as the Jessie Richardson award for Outstanding Theatre Production in the large theatre category and was remounted in 2007 as part of The Push International Theatre Festival. Her other plays for Green Thumb include The Invisible Girl and The Skinny Lie, which continue to be produced throughout Canada and The USA. Her play Tree Boy, inspired by The Inconvenient Truth and a trip to Costa Rica, premiered in the fall of 2007 in Vancouver. 

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Playwright in Residence

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist whose work has been seen across North and South America. She has written and co-written fourteen plays, including collaborations with James Fagan Tait and Electric Company Theatre. She has been Playwright-in-Residence at The Vancouver Playhouse, where she first developed her play The Refugee Hotel, which received its world premiere at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto this past fall, in a production by Alameda Theatre Company. She has also been playwright-in-residence at Touchstone Theatre, where she developed her play The Trigger, which premiered at the 2005 PuSh International Festival.



Carmen Aguirre’s new play The Tina Modotti Project is based on the life of Tina Modotti, a master of twentieth century photography. The Belfry Theatre will provide Carmen with dramaturgical support, workshops of the script, and a public reading in late 2010.



“Tina Modotti’s incredible life story, and the huge questions around art and politics with which she grappled, are of great interest to me.  I hope to write a play that matches the intensity and beauty of her life. My challenge will lie in finding the right form and structure, as there will be more than enough content to choose from.”

Tina Modotti led an extraordinary, inherently theatrical life. Born in Italy to working class parents, she emigrated to San Francisco at the age of 16, worked as a seamstress and participated in union activities. In 1916, at the age of 19, she went to Los Angeles to pursue her acting dreams. There, she led a bohemian lifestyle with a photographer called Robo. Although she appeared in a few Hollywood movies, playing the femme fatale or “gypsy woman,” her acting career never took off.  However, she eventually became photography great Edward Weston’s model, student, and lover.

In post-revolutionary Mexico she modeled for Diego Rivera, and became principal photographer for the Mexican muralists. Tina’s inner circle included Frida Kahlo, Pablo Neruda, and the muralist Jose Orozco.  By 1927, she was a contributing photographer to communist publications, and was active in the Mexican Communist Party.

In 1929 the Mexican government tried to pin Tina with the killing of her lover Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban exile and revolutionary.  Although the charges were eventually dropped, she was deported from Mexico.  She moved to Berlin.  She helped to run the International Red Aid in Paris.  She joined the Soviet Communist Party and moved to Moscow, with her lover, Vittorio Vidali.

Fluent in Italian, Spanish, English, German, and Russian, Tina became a spy for the USSR, in the years leading up to the Second World War.  She moved to Spain and participated in the civil war.  Under the pseudonym “Maria,” she ran a hospital in Madrid, working alongside Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, helping him perform blood transfusions in the trenches.

On January 5th, 1942, she died of a heart attack in the back of a taxi cab in Mexico City. She was 46 years old.