Sochi Fried as Susan and Kristopher Bowman as Mike, in Wait Until Dark at the Shaw Festival.Michael Cooper/Supplied
Title: Wait Until Dark
Written by: Frederick Knott, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
Performed by: Kristopher Bowman, Sochi Fried, JJ Gerber, Martin Happer, Bruce Horak, Eponine Lee
Directed by: Sanjay Talwar
Company: Shaw Festival
Venue: Festival Theatre
City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
Year: Runs to Oct. 5
What’s frustrating about Wait Until Dark, the drowsy, dull thriller devoid of thrills now playing at the Shaw Festival, isn’t really the acting. And it’s hardly the sets or costumes, either: Both ably capture the wartime paranoia of 1944. Director Sanjay Talwar, too, does his best with the material and infuses the play with a quick pace that keeps the runtime mercifully short.
But Jeffrey Hatcher’s text, an adaptation of Frederick Knott’s 1966 play – a story best known for the 1967 film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn – is clunky and confusing, a confounding choice for the festival and a script that ought to swim with the fishes.
At least on paper, the story is rife with suspense: Susan, a blind housewife (Sochi Fried) must outsmart three charlatans (Kristopher Bowman, Martin Happer and Bruce Horak) who are on the hunt for a doll filled with heroin. As it turns out, Susan’s unwittingly had the doll in her possession all along – her husband Sam (JJ Gerber) was tricked into transporting it by a woman who has since been murdered.
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With only her wits and a petulant teenage neighbour (Eponine Lee) to save her, Susan is in quite the pickle. And, broadly speaking, such pickles tend to make for fascinating theatre.
Not so here. Hatcher’s script, which resets Knott’s play to the 1940s, spends a curious amount of time explaining how the criminals communicate with one another – their system relies on opening and closing Susan’s blinds, which are quite noisy, so Susan quickly senses that something’s not right. By the time the central conflict of the play becomes clear, there’s been so much extraneous explanation of how blinds work that the whereabouts of the doll and its illicit contents feel almost irrelevant to the stage business at hand.
As well, much of the humour baked into Hatcher’s text makes Susan – and more troublingly, her disability – the butt of the joke. “You’re a clever blind girl!” one of the gangsters cackles with surprise near the end of the play. In 2025, that remark lands with the dull thud of a dozen steps backward for disability representation in Canadian theatre.
There are a few fine performances in Talwar’s staging: Fried adds some depth to the flat-as-a-pancake heroine, and Bowman, Happer and Horak each play the bad guy with a convincing level of gruff rancor. Lee is perhaps the standout as bratty teen Gloria – she adds a lightness to Talwar’s production that keeps the scenes, painful as they are, ticking along.
As mentioned, Wait Until Dark, at the very least, is nice to look at. Lorenzo Savoini’s naturalistic set encapsulates the gloomy damp of a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, complete with vintage appliances in the kitchen and antique light fixtures screwed into the walls. Working together with costume designer Ming Wong, Savoini conjures a living space that is both sanctuary and lair, full of tactile cues to help Susan get her bearings (against the wishes of her captors).
The problem with a production whose strengths are almost entirely visual? The final 20 minutes or so of Wait Until Dark takes place in a near-blackout, save for a deep blue wash that presumably ensures the actors don’t hurt themselves as they manoeuvre the stage (Louise Guinand is the lighting designer). A climactic cat-and-mouse sequence in the lightless apartment leaves Hatcher’s script to carry the action of the play on its own merit – a tough ask, given there’s hardly any.
There are better shows to see at this year’s Shaw Festival – Gnit, Tons of Money, Major Barbara – and better ways to enjoy Knott’s original story. (I’d recommend the film.) But Wait Until Dark is well past its best-by date, and there’s no amount of set-dressing that can mask the creaks in Hatcher’s script.
