Review: The Welkin packs a wallop

The 2025/26 Toronto theatre season officially kicked off this week with Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin (Rating: ✭✭✭✭✭), a co-production between two of the city’s most exciting and relevant theatres — Soulpepper and Crow’s — as well as The Howland Company, an indie outfit that consistently finds intriguing and memorable plays to mount (The Wolves, Prodigal, Heroes of the Fourth Turning).

Because of the scale and ambition of the work — cast of sixteen, two-and-a-half hour+ running time — it needed all three of these companies to pool resources. Not only that, but this production is the final one directed by Soulpepper’s outgoing artistic director, Weyni Mengesha.

After her seven-year tenure, interrupted of course by the pandemic, Mengesha is going out with a bang. This is one of those layered, complex, endlessly fascinating plays that deserves to be seen and savoured multiple times.

The intriguing setting is an English village in 1759. A scrappy young woman named Sally Poppy (Bahia Watson) has been sentenced to hang for the brutal murder — committed with her lover — of a young child. She claims she’s pregnant, and so as the bizarre legal system of the time dictates, a jury of 12 women gathers in a stuffy upstairs room of the courthouse to decide if she’s telling the truth. If so, she will give birth to her child and then be shipped off to the new world.

Over a couple of hours, the women — a mix of ages and classes — talk and argue about Sally. They feel her breasts for milk. They question her moral background. None of them wants to be there. They’d rather be back home with their families, tending to their crops (one woman, played by the delightful Brefny Caribou, is obsessed with harvesting her leeks), doing housework.

Oh, housework. In an early, masterfully choreographed sequence, we are introduced to the women sweeping, beating rugs, weaving, scrubbing the floor. Another remarkable sequence finds the play’s lead character, Lizzy Luke (Mayko Nguyen), churning butter while laundry dries on a line. When she leaves for the trial, her daughter Katy (Addison Wagman) reluctantly takes over the task, and the repetitive sound of the churning (the brilliant sound design is by Thomas Ryder Payne) continues through to the next scene.

Lizzy is a midwife. And while she’s at first reluctant to join the jury, she eventually gives in. Sally, it turns out, was the first child she ever brought into the world. Perhaps she can save her.

If there’s a flaw in the script, it’s the lack of detail around the murder. Sally appears in the first scene (beautifully candlelit by Bonnie Beecher) to ask her abandoned, cuckolded husband (Cameron Laurie) for money owed her. Her smock is covered with blood. We don’t hear much about her relationship with her lover. Later dialogue with the women provides some details about a prominent house she may have worked in, and the abuses she likely suffered there.

What I think Kirkwood is after is taking an all-encompassing look at how to locate truth and achieve justice — two-and-a-half centuries ago and today. But with a feminist slant. In one way, this feels like a response to the classic drama 12 Angry Men; it also shows the influence of The Crucible. In today’s divisive world, it feels especially urgent and relevant.

Mengesha offers up a fully realized production. Julie Fox’s set evokes the plain stone and wood of a dusty, 18th century room, while Michelle Tracey’s costumes tell us as much about the women’s socio-economic position as their dialogue. When the pre-menopausal (not that they have words for it) Judith (the magnificent Olunike Adeliyi) opens up a window for some air, the sound of a restless, bloodthirsty mob outside sounds eerily authentic. And Beecher’s lighting is so moody and effective it will remind you of the Old Masters.

The cast couldn’t be improved. I’ve watched Nguyen in maybe half a dozen roles, and have never seen her as grounded or as present. Watson’s Poppy might be underwritten, but the actor suggests her character’s years of struggle and defiance; there are shades of the fierce women of The Handmaid’s Tale (which Watson starred in) in her work here.

Among the other jurors, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Fiona Highet, Kyra Harper, Raquel Duffy, Hallie Seline, Natasha Mumba, Annie Luján and Caribou provide deeply lived-in and memorable characters. Craig Lauzon is terrific as a bailiff and thatcher who must stand by (mostly silently) as the women deliberate; so is Laurie as a physician who arrives near the end of the play to mansplain things.

Kirkwood, whose The Children and Chimerica (at least in their productions here) left me cold, creates an old world that speaks to today. There are lots of period details and language, but it feels anything but stuffy. There are also a couple of modernisms that are too fun to spoil. The most surprising one begins when Lancaster raises her voice, presumably to sing a comforting song that turns into something wilder and more expansive (Q: did Stranger Things borrow from Kirkwood?)

She also provides the long, slow-moving trajectory of Halley’s Comet as a metaphor of sorts. For the progress of women’s rights? The insignificance of humans in a larger universe? The mysteries of existence?

Sure. All of them; none of them. Mengesha doesn’t dwell too much on symbols. She’s more interested in these women’s lives and daily, urgent concerns. Over the past decades, she has directed some unforgettable plays. Count this one among them.

The Welkin continues at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts’ Baillie Theatre (50 Tank House Lane) until October 5 . Details available here

Ticket giveaway

So Sumi is giving away a pair of tickets to Dave Malloy’s Octet, which runs at Crow’s Theatre (in a Crow’s/Musical Stage Co. co-production) until October 12. Details of the run are here.

To win them, correctly answer the following question: What two Malloy works did Crow’s present in earlier seasons? Please send the answer by Sunday, September 14, 6 pm, to SoSumiContact@gmail.com. Put Octet Contest in the email subject heading.

One winner will be chosen from among the correct entries. Entrants must be So Sumi subscribers (either paid or free). Performance date are subject to availability. The winner will be contacted on Monday.