King Theatre Company brings Margaret Atwood’s celebrated novel to the stage in its professional Canadian premiere in Schomberg.
This November in Schomberg, one of Canadian literature’s most memorable figures will step off the page and onto the stage. King Theatre Company is presenting the professional Canadian premiere of Alias Grace, Jennifer Blackmer’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel, at Schomberg Community Hall.
Set against a notorious 19th-century murder case, the play examines memory, culpability and the shadowy spaces of the human mind. Its central question is as unsettling as it is compelling: Can Grace Marks be trusted?
King Theatre Company’s website gives a brief synopsis:
“In 1843, 16-year-old Grace Marks was accused of brutally murdering her employer and his housekeeper. Imprisoned for years, Grace swears she has no memory of the killings. A doctor in the emerging field of mental health arrives to try to uncover the truth.”
The story carries an added local resonance. Its historical world is rooted in Richmond Hill and York Region, placing the events close to the company’s Schomberg home.
For Chloë Rose Flowers, King Theatre’s artistic director and the actor playing Grace, the production is both a professional milestone and a long-gestating passion project. Flowers, a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, first encountered Atwood’s historical novel years ago and was drawn to the way it blends archival fact with speculation.
Atwood filters the case through Dr. Simon Jordan, a physician fascinated by the emerging field of mental health and determined to understand Grace’s claimed amnesia. As doctor and patient circle one another, their boundaries blur—and Jordan’s certainty begins to erode.
That ambiguity drives the play. Is Grace revealing the truth, reshaping it or withholding the one detail that might resolve the case?
Flowers describes the role as an extraordinary opportunity:
“It’s such a gift of a role. I feel as if I’ve been living with this play for so long and preparing for it for so long that rehearsals are feeling like the beginning of the end.”
The research is considerable. Audiences first meet Grace at 30, but the action reaches back to her life at 16, requiring Flowers to trace the social and historical forces that shaped her. The goal, she says, is not to settle the mystery but to present a full portrait of how Grace arrived at this point.
Director Iain Moggach has a reputation for imaginative, actor-focused work. Although he had not read the novel before joining the production, its title had lingered in his mind since childhood, when a copy sat on his parents’ bookshelf. When Flowers invited him to direct, Moggach read the novel and Blackmer’s script side by side. The process allowed him to see how the adaptation compresses Atwood’s layered narrative while preserving its psychological tension:
“Honestly, I’m really excited about it. It’s a big show, not only because it’s the professional Canadian premiere, so there’s a lot of weight and expectation around that.”
The scale is substantial for the intimate Schomberg Community Hall: eight actors, multiple characters and a story that moves through time, memory and competing versions of events. Much of Moggach’s preparation has centred on the choreography of transitions—how one scene dissolves into another and how those shifts help the audience assemble the puzzle.
Flowers and Moggach stress that no prior knowledge is required: audiences need not have read Atwood’s novel or watched the television miniseries to follow the story onstage. Are they hoping the famed Canadian novelist will attend? Tickets have been set aside each night for her in case she decides. It’s in the theatre gods’ hands to make that call.
To view the complete cast and crew list of the play, visit: https://www.kingtheatre.ca/aliasgrace
At its heart, Alias Grace resists the comfort of a simple verdict. Instead, it invites theatregoers to listen closely, question every recollection and decide for themselves what or whom they believe.
Performance details: Presented by King Theatre Company and HosPall Homecare, Alias Grace runs Nov. 6–15 at Schomberg Community Hall, 325 Main Street, Schomberg. For tickets, visit kingtheatre.ca/aliasgrace, call 647-622-6055 or email kingtheatrecompany@gmail.com.
