Writer: Hannah Moscovitch
Director: Christian Barry
Celebrated Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s Red Like Fruit examines gender, narrative, and space, though its own structure sometimes works against it.
The play opens with Michelle Monteith as Lauren entering alongside David Patrick Flemming as Luke. Lauren announces that she has asked Luke to speak on her behalf, then takes a seat on an elevated platform while Luke stays on the ground, opens a book, and begins to read her story in the third person.
We learn that Lauren is a journalist tasked with investigating a serious misconduct case involving a senior member of the Liberal Party. As she interviews those involved, she begins to experience vivid memories from earlier in her life: moments of violation in childhood, harm from a family member during adolescence, and an incident with a college partner in which her wishes were disregarded while she was sickened by his existence. These memories carry both emotional and physical weight, and they sit in sharp contrast to the detached way Luke delivers them.
The choice to have a man narrate a woman’s story is a strong metaphor for how women’s voices are often overshadowed by men. Yet in this staging, the device risks diminishing Lauren’s presence. Even though she occupies a physically prominent position on stage, the fact that Luke ‘owns’ her voice removes a degree of her agency. Audience attention naturally shifts to him rather than to the protagonist whose life is being recounted.
The play’s most troubling revelation isn’t Lauren’s trauma, but her internalised justification for male mediation. She believes Luke’s voice is more ‘authoritative’ and ‘neutral’. This represents the same logic that historically excluded women from public discourse. This internalised misogyny manifests in her dismissal of202 her assaults as typical ‘messy teenager’ experiences, revealing how deeply patriarchal narratives have colonised her self-understanding.
In the few exchanges between Lauren and Luke, she fails to form any challenging conversation between the two sides of herself: the patriarchy-tamed side and the side that is still hurting from that patriarchy. Instead, she and Luke engage in arguments about quite naive things, like what constitutes the difference between various forms of non-consensual sex. There is one moment with the women from her therapy group when they hold her as she tells her story that an alternative way begins to show in this narrative, but this doesn’t translate to the metanarrative and challenge the power structure between Lauren and Luke.
The play shows us how patriarchal structures silence women’s voices, but its metanarrative structure could definitively benefit from a more careful redesign to explore more on the contradicting nature of our internal world.
Runs until 24 August 2025
