2026–2027
Love and Anger
Playwright: George Walker
November 5, 2026 – November 22, 2026
The Mainstage
George F. Walker's Love and Anger is one of the sharpest and most formally confident plays in the East End cycle — a legal drama that uses the genre's familiar architecture of antagonists and advocates to ask harder questions about what justice actually requires of the people who pursue it. At its centre is Gail Jones, a young civil rights lawyer whose idealism is neither mocked nor simply vindicated by the play, but tested in ways that feel genuinely costly. Walker is not interested in making his principled characters comfortable, and Love and Anger is perhaps the East End play that most clearly demonstrates why his work has endured: it refuses the easy resolution that its genre premises seem to promise.
The production is directed by Priya Sharma, for whom this is a return engagement with the play — her second time directing Love and Anger following a critically acclaimed 2019 production in Vancouver. Sharma is joined by Montreal-based set designer Étienne Beausoleil, whose work has been seen at the Stratford Festival and the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, and by Anastasia Volkov, a Kyiv-trained sound designer who has been one of Toronto's most in-demand collaborators since her arrival in Canada in 2015. Conrad Mills, a two-time Ember Award winner for lighting design, and Josephine Park, known for her meticulous contemporary costume work at Factory Theatre and Soulpepper, complete the design team.
The cast is led by Amanda Osei, a Ember-nominated actor making her third appearance in a Priya Sharma production, and includes Vivienne Cross, a forty-year veteran of the Canadian stage and recipient of a lifetime achievement Ember Award in 2018, in the role of Eleanor. Tony Marchetti, James Whitfield, and Nadia Reeves round out the ensemble.
Cast
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Gail Jones
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Babe Brown
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Peter Doyle
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Eleanor
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Sarah Downing
Production Team
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Director
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Set Design
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Costume Design
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Lighting Design
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Sound Design
About this play
A group of people bound by affection and grievance collide in a volatile emotional landscape where tenderness, anger, and disappointment constantly reshape their relationships.
A sharp ensemble play that pits desire, idealism, and resentment against one another as personal loyalties fray under emotional and social pressure.
About the Playwright
George F. Walker is one of Canada's most celebrated and prolific playwrights, widely regarded as a defining voice of the country's theatrical landscape. Born in Toronto's East End in 1947, Walker began writing plays in the early 1970s with little formal training and no particular plan — a fact that perhaps accounts for the restless, rule-breaking energy that runs through all of his work. His output over five decades spans more than thirty plays, ranging from absurdist political satire to the dark domestic comedies for which he is best known. The "East End Plays" — a loosely connected cycle that includes Criminals in Love, Better Living, Escape from Happiness, and several others — centre on working-class Toronto families navigating poverty, corruption, and dysfunction with a bleak wit that is entirely Walker's own. These plays established him as a writer with a particular gift for finding the tragicomic in ordinary desperation, and for crafting dialogue that crackles with menace and absurdity in equal measure. Walker has received the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama four times, a distinction no other Canadian playwright has matched. His work has been produced across North America, Europe, and Australia, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has also written extensively for film and television, including the long-running series This Is Wonderland, which brought his characteristic social conscience to a mainstream audience.