REVIEW: Here For Now’s Dinner with the Duchess is an aching étude on the cost of creative passion
iPhoto caption: Photo by Ann Baggley.
I saw Margaret, subject of Here For Now Theatre’s Dinner with the Duchess (presented in association with Crow’s Theatre), before anyone stepped into her Darren Burkett-designed downtown condo. A painted portrait of the fictional, regally nicknamed violinist looms centre stage, multi-coloured and fragmented against sleekly monochrome furnishings: a visual dissection of an artist confronting her legacy, whose layers playwright Nick Green peels back in his bitterly beautiful character study, fresh from a 2024 production in Here For Now’s home location of Stratford.
Margaret, a renowned virtuoso forced into early retirement by arthritis, demands “honesty” from Helen, the young journalist conducting her farewell interview, lamenting “trite” clickbait culture. With poised and prepared lyrical reflections on her career, draped in a sharp, authoritative black shift (courtesy of costume designer Monique Lund), Margaret seems in total command of the evening, with her husband David (who she insistently dubs “comic relief for the evening”) serving zested-up Italian takeout and offering humanizing ledes of their marriage for Margaret to run with.
The vibe is quite carefully curated for someone proclaiming to desire honesty, and Helen resists the performance, probing the anxious avoidance underneath. Margaret grows increasingly wary of a tape recorder between them, and quips with her over-the-shoulder husband grow colder than untouched pasta. The bowstrings snap when Helen demands accountability for an alleged outburst toward a male conductor — the origin of Margaret’s diva-esque nickname. The Duchess sees a hit-piece forming and descends into a desperate plea, begging to “disappear” and be remembered for the music she gave her life to.
Margaret’s desire for a clean legacy initiates Green’s engagement with the gendered dynamics of artistic accountability. She details a lineage of female violinists whose defiant success with a so-called “man’s instrument” created a butterfly effect leading to her own passion for playing — a chain of empowerment a tarnished legacy could interrupt. She also traces the history of men hijacking the triumphs of women musicians, from 19th-century violin prodigy Wilma Neruda, to Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Music Video Awards, to her own unspoken “incident.”
Green examines the higher expectations of women to tolerate and even collaborate with men who’ve harmed them if they want to to build a legacy that can be ruined in the first place, while being judged more harshly if this tolerance cracks. Dinner with the Duchess frames Margaret’s behaviour as a tragic inevitability in a toxic arts culture, while never outright excusing what she’s done. Rather, Green offers an image of immense pressure bubbling over, saving final judgment for us.
The Crow’s Studio Theatre brings us right up close to an intimate simmer brought bursting to boil by Kelli Fox’s realism-grounded direction (stage manager Kelsey Raye doubles as lighting designer of the condo’s single-state LED brightness). A battle of quick glances and raised eyebrows setting off explosions, Fox’s production trusts the tension in silence and stillness before building to swelling emotional crescendos.
Jan Alexandra Smith brings concerto-like complexity to Margaret’s journey from sarcastic confidence to aching vulnerability. Her performance is a chord progression, suspended in each glance at Helen’s notebook — a dissonant clawing for control that clears the way for an incredibly cathartic resolution once she accepts where her passion has brought her.
As Helen and David, Rosie Simon and David Keeley deliver captivating nuance in durational stretches of listening. Keeley had me tearing myself from Smith to watch him watch her, eyes here holding an entire history of passion lost. Simon holds a razor-like-focus in Helen’s silent studying of her subject, though because the character spends so much time extracting Margaret’s truth, her own motivations remain the least developed, especially once journalistic boundaries begin to break down — she at times feels representative of celebrity media as a whole, rather than a fully formed individual.
When an emotionally bare Margaret finally shares her truth with Helen, she compares life to a chaconne, a musical form that offers increasingly complex variations on a simple theme before returning to simplicity. This is Dinner with the Duchess’ most powerful variation on its own themes, with Green turning the question of separating art and the artist back on the artist herself. Margaret realizes that in her pursuit of passion in her music and relationships, the two realms have become irreversibly entangled. With the ability to play gone, she is forced to confront the reality that her chaconne may never return to its simplicity, and wonder if these sacrifices are worth the legacy she’ll leave. Dinner with the Duchess is a tallying of an artistic life’s costs that builds a symphony out of simple presentation, resounding long past the final note.
Dinner with the Duchess runs at Crow’s Theatre until February 9. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
jonnie lombard
jonnie is a trans theatre artist / thing from the woods stumbling through sidequests of sentience. They were a participant in the 2024 New Young Reviewers Program, and will always say yes if you ask them to go dancing.
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