• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

What stories do we tell ourselves to keep our walls up and our privilege intact? What is the cost of revolution?

In this contemporary retelling of Antigone, denial of what rages outside of a city’s perimeter comes to a head when a young princess named Alison tries to expose the truth of her beloved cousin Henry’s death. By night, Henry went as Andy, as together he and Alison scaled the walls of their kingdom to help the migrants who are kept out of sight. Burdened by the weight of the inequality that his future reign represented, he killed himself. But his mother, Queen Regina, hails his death as a valiant knight and will do anything she can to keep Alison silent. The two women become locked in a poetic battle of power and prejudice, until a push turning into a shove might mean it’s too late to find peace.

Marie-Claude Verdier’s first play, Je n’y suis plus, was produced at the National Arts Centre’s French Theatre. Her play Nous autres antipodes received an honourable mention by the Prix Gratien-Gélinas from the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD). In 2018, Marie-Claude became the first playwright-in-residence at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), where she worked on her play Apparitions. She is currently working on a sci-fi play, Seeker, which Alexis Diamond has been commissioned to translate for BoucheWHACKED! Theatre Collective. Marie-Claude is also a dramaturg and has worked with many distinguished directors, including Marc Beaupré, Christian Lapointe, and Benoît Vermeulen. She lives in Laval.

Marie-Claude Verdier's profile page

Alexis Diamond is a theatre artist, opera and musical librettist, translator, and theatre curator working on both sides of Montréal’s linguistic divide. Her award-winning works have been presented across Canada, the US, and Europe. Her translation of Pascal Brullemans’ plays for young audiences, Amaryllis and Little Witch (Playwrights Canada Press) was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Award. In 2018, Alexis began a collaboration with Erin Hurley and Emma Tibaldo researching the history of English-language theatre in Québec. Alexis is the Anglo-Canadian theatre curator for the famed Festival du Jamais Lu; she presented the mostly French-language Faux-amis with co-author Hubert Lemire for the festival in 2019 and has continued to work on it with Hubert at the 2021 Banff Playwrights Lab. Upcoming tours of her theatre translations include The Problem with Pink by Érika Tremblay-Roy and Pascal Brullemans’s The Nonexistent. She is currently working on translating Alexia Bürger's Les Hardings and Marie-Hélène Larose-Truchon's Un oiseau m'attend. She lives in Montréal.

Alexis Diamond's profile page

“Astute, relevant, at once brutal and sophisticated.”

Michel Flandrin, France Bleu Vaucluse

“Very loosely inspired by the classical tragedy, the script written by a young Quebec playwright—Marie-Claude Verdier—uses the current geopolitical context as the basis for the conflict between state policy and personal values.”

Yves Kafka, Le bruit du off