From the left: Mirza Sarhan, Zorana Sadiq, Imali Perera, Afroza Banu, Muhaddisah, and Anusree Roy perform a scene in Trident Moon.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: Trident Moon
- Written by: Anusree Roy
- Director: Nina Lee Aquino
- Actors: Sahiba Arora, Afroza Banu, Sehar Bhojani, Michelle Mohammed, Muhaddisah, Prerna Nehta, Imali Perera, Anusree Roy, Zorana Sadiq, Mirza Sarhan
- Company: Crow’s Theatre and National Arts Centre English Theatre
- Venue: Crow’s Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until March 30, 2025
Critic’s Pick
It can be easy to consider human migration solely at its most macro scale, an abstract idea made commonplace in a cloud of televised, politicized noise.
Indeed, the issue of mass immigration rests at the centre of nearly every recent political era, from this month’s trade war, fuelled in part by the inconsistently policed border between the U.S. and Mexico, to the seismic international unrest prompted by Brexit in 2016. In Canada, large-scale immigration has become the scapegoat for any number of social woes, with temporary foreign workers and international students being blamed for everything from housing crises to entry-level job shortages.
But there is, of course, a deeply personal cutting edge to the issue of mass human migration. It’s a matter defined by its vessels, the trucks, tunnels and boats used on migrants’ odysseys to safer, or at least more hospitable, ground. These journeys tend toward smelly, deadly, cramped. They are often, for lack of a better word, hell.
In 1947, British India splintered into modern-day India and Pakistan, separating along religious lines in a bloody process known as the partition of India. The state of Punjab split in half, prompting a sharp rise in India’s Sikh population as Punjabi Sikhs migrated south toward the newly Hindu-dominant India.
In Trident Moon, Anusree Roy’s formidable, bruising play about nine women en route to a better life south of Pakistan, human migration becomes excruciatingly specific. In the spirit of such provocative playwrights as Sarah Kane and Edward Bond, Roy showcases the brutality at the heart of geopolitical discord, digging into the implied violence of a minacious border with sharp teeth and open eyes.
We meet the women on the back of a truck, divided into two groups: Muslims and Hindus. Alo (Roy) is the group’s reluctant leader – she swings a loaded pistol and intermittently points it at the Muslims (Imali Perera, Muhaddisah and Prerna Mehta) she’s tied up on the other side of the lorry.
On the Hindu side of the truck is Alo, her sister Bani (Sehar Bhojani), who’s been shot, and her niece, Arun (Sahiba Arora), who lives with an unspecified intellectual disability.
The truck stops thrice en route to the new India, each time introducing a new passenger – the pregnant Sonali (Zorana Sadiq, in a career-high performance) and Sumaiya and Munni (Afroza Banu and Michelle Mohammed), who we’re told are grandmother and granddaughter.
The third stop brings young man Lovely (Mirza Sarhan) into the fold, and at once, Trident Moon lurches into the realm of body horror.
Nina Lee Aquino directs a ruthless, charged production that spares no shock in its examination of a fraught boundary. When child bride Munni regurgitates her wedding gold, it’s impossible to look away, to ignore the suffering woven between the bangles and intricate chains. Bani’s guttural screams of pain, too, shred through the air as Sadiq’s Sonali fishes two bullets from the flesh of her belly.
Without adequate dramaturgical care, Trident Moon might have withered into melodrama or trope. But Roy’s script writhes with precision and complexity, seldom succumbing to cliché – there is no Chekhov’s gun to be found in Alo’s loaded pistol, no blinding light of new hope when the truck reaches its final destination. When Hindu Bani is forced to chomp down on a cow-leather shoe, the “bite the bullet” resonance is obvious and painful without feeling heavy-handed; the visual storytelling on display in Trident Moon is tremendous, aided by Ming Wong’s dirt and urine-soaked costumes, Michelle Ramsay’s hot, hazy lighting and Romeo Candido’s eerie soundscape.
Much like Clare Bayley’s 2007 play The Container, Trident Moon uses the extremes of the senses to make its points – the chew of a rotten roti, the stench of a severed head, the echo of a misplaced giggle. This is a truthful, fearless piece of theatre from one of this country’s most uncompromising playwrights, and about a subject that only stands to become more timely as borders around the world fracture and crack.
Trident Moon might not be for the faint of heart. But then again, neither is war.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
