THEATRE REVIEW

MAY 2026 | Volume 263

 

Irish playwright Carys D. Coburn’s City Song is a lyrical meditation on Time as experienced in the lives of a clutch of characters in a city that might be Dublin. My friend, excellent theatre critic Jo Ledingham, called it a cross between Dylan Thomas and Our Town. My first thought was James Joyce.

In Joan Bryans’ impressive Vital Spark Theatre production an ensemble of nine actors traces a handful of lives forward and backwards and forward as—in a repeated refrain—“time ticks onward, not cruelly but unstoppably.”

Most of City Song is told to us, in Irish accents, by revolving narrators played by each of the actors. The play begins and ends with the journeys of a cabbie (Daryl Hutchings) as he drives through the city, picking up fares who will become our principals: a couple, Kate (Claire deBruyn) and Rob (Jono Klassen), Kate’s brother Michael (Alex Bloor) and mother Brigid (Kim Little), Brigid’s husband Frank (Hutchings again) and grandson Fionn (Liam Atticus Wong, who also plays Brigid’s caregiver). Lauren Jane Ross, Gaia Preite and Mukta Chachra round out the cast.

We follow the central characters, Brigid and Kate and Rob, as they age. Kate gives birth, Brigid loses her husband and deteriorates to the point where she needs in-home care. Brigid’s is the most poignant story. Feeling helpless, abandoned, alone, she sighs, “I’m haunted by the emptiness of everything.” But that low point is a rarity in a play where the journey is not entirely chronological. We keep flashing back to the characters’ younger years when they, Brigid included, mostly experience life’s fullness.

As you might expect from an Irish play, the existential pain is leavened with humour and the beauty of language, even if the sometimes thick Irish accents obscure some of the lyrical prose. There’s a great deal of sex talk in the play and frequent comical use of the F-word, especially in a hysterical scene where four women express the pain of childbirth in a loud, raucous chorus of obscenities.

The acting is strong across the board, especially among the principal actors, and Sam Cheng’s lighting helps immensely in creating dynamic transitions as director Bryans ensures that the pace never flags. In a spring season of mostly musicals and comedies City Song is a welcome excursion into a deeper, richer theatrical world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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