Two legendary Canadian artists reunite at Tarragon Theatre in this audacious new play

It’s a power pose of sorts. But as we learn later in Judith Thompson’s dizzying and overly ambitious new play “Queen Maeve,” her striking pose also serves as a coping mechanism — not a sword but a shield, guarding her from the slings and arrows aimed toward her. 

Mrs. Nurmi lives with death all around her, the screams and cries of fellow nursing home residents reverberating into her dilapidated room. She has a strained relationship with her daughter Georgia (Sarah Orenstein), an artist who’s long struggled with bouts of depression, and whom Mrs. Nurmi accuses of being a neglectful mother and the reason why her grandson, Jake (Ryan Bommarito), routinely abuses drugs. 

Thompson’s protagonist is unmoored. Her sense of control, over herself and the things around her, is slipping away. She often retreats into a world of fantasy where she’s the mythological Irish warrior, Queen Maeve, towering over her subjects and valiantly leading her army into battle. 

But when she’s out of this fantasy, Mrs. Nurmi is a character bristling with contradictions. And Coulter, one of Canadian theatre’s great talents, draws out these knots with unfaltering clarity.

In some moments, her Mrs. Nurmi is brittle, stubborn and vile, hurling vitriolic comments towards her daughter. She speaks through her hands, calloused fingers pointing, accusatorially, with such scorn and derision that you half expect lightning bolts to shoot out of their nails. But in other moments, Coulter’s Mrs. Nurmi comes across as painfully innocent. When she sits on the side of her bed, legs dangling freely above the ground, she almost looks like a schoolgirl playing on a swing.

Anyone who knows a relative living with dementia, teetering on the edge of this world and another, is almost certain to see their loved one reflected in Coulter’s perceptive performance. 

“Queen Maeve,” however, is more than merely a star vehicle for Coulter. Director Mike Payette’s production at Tarragon Theatre, heavy on stage smoke and brilliantly drawing the audience into Mrs. Nurmi’s fractured world, features a quartet of strong performances. 

Caroline Gillis’s Siobhan, a personal support worker who cares for Mrs. Nurmi, is patience and grace personified. Bommarito, meanwhile, is appropriately mysterious and guarded as Jake, who changes form like quicksilver before the audience’s eyes. And Orenstein is sympathetic as Jake’s mother, desperately seeking her own mother’s love and validation. 

Thompson’s writing works slowly. Her scenes are long and verbose. Conflicts arise gradually, almost as if we’re on a boat, little by little listing to one side, imperceptible at first until it’s too late. 

But the issue with “Queen Maeve” is that it feels both overwritten and underwritten at the same time. At its heart, Thompson’s play is a family drama, about intergenerational relationships and the trauma we pass down from one generation to the next. 

Thompson, however, struggles to stitch together those intimate themes with her more mythical threads. Midway through, she also awkwardly shifts the play’s perspective. What was previously a work taking place in Mrs. Nurmi’s mind inexplicably changes to her daughter’s point of view. It all becomes too overwhelming when flashback sequences are piled on top of present-day scenes and moments that flirt with fantasy. 

All this dulls the play’s emotional impact. And in the final scenes, I could feel Thompson writing herself into a corner.

“Queen Maeve” eventually ends without a final resolution to its key, mother-daughter dispute. To expect that, I guess, would be asking for too much. (After all, so many conflicts with those we love most go unresolved, and that’s what makes them so painful.) But for a work of drama, this lack of resolution feels like a melodic line in search of a final cadence.

There’s also a frustrating and grating clash in how Thompson’s script ends and how Payette puts a bow on his production. Whereas the playwright wants her audience to sit in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty, Payette offers a visual flourish that feels unearned. No matter how beautifully designer Jason Hand lights this tableau, it’s a moment of catharsis — of exaltation — that neither Mrs. Nurmi nor we, the audience, quite truly deserve.