2026–2027
Nothing Sacred
Playwright: George Walker
February 4, 2027 – February 21, 2027
The Mainstage
Nothing Sacred is the outlier in George F. Walker's body of work — not an original play but an adaptation drawn from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children, relocated to Canada and inflected with Walker's own preoccupations without domesticating or diminishing the original. The result is one of the most intellectually alive plays in the Canadian repertoire: a comedy of ideas that takes ideas seriously enough to let them damage the people who hold them. Bazarov, Walker's version of Turgenev's famous nihilist, is one of the great roles in Canadian drama, and Nothing Sacred remains the definitive theatrical engagement in this country with the question of what happens when ideology meets ordinary human feeling.
The production is directed by André Mensah, recipient of the 2023 Harbinger Prize — Canada's most significant theatre award — whose previous work includes productions at the Stratford Festival, the National Arts Centre, and the Canadian Opera Company. Mensah is joined by Yuki Nakashima, a scenographer trained at both the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the Prague Academy of Performing Arts, whose designs have been seen at the Shaw Festival and Canadian Stage. Valentina Cruz, a Colombian-Canadian designer who has worked extensively with Cahoots Theatre and Obsidian Theatre, handles lighting, with Irish-Canadian veteran Owen Gallagher — a Stratford and Shaw alumnus — designing costumes, and Brendan Szabo, whose sound design practice grew out of a decade as a touring musician, completing the team.
The cast brings together Geoffrey Crane, making his first appearance outside the Shaw Festival in eleven years, as Pavel alongside Sasha Korenev, a St. Petersburg-born actor whose own background in Russian culture gives him a distinctive point of entry into the role of Bazarov. Kyle Drummond, appearing in his mainstage debut, plays Arkady. Isabelle Marchand, a bilingual actor trained at both the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Actors Studio Drama School in New York, takes the role of Anna Odintsova, with Rosa Delacroix and Robert Fielding completing the ensemble.
Cast
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Arkady
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Bazarov
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Nikolai
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Pavel
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Anna Odintsova
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Fenichka
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
Through biting comedy and moral unease, the play follows characters navigating hypocrisy, status, and self-preservation, revealing how easily principle can yield to convenience.
A satirical drama that skewers public virtue and private compromise, exposing the uneasy bargains people make in the name of decency and belonging.
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.