Erin Humphry and Blessing Adedijjo in The Moors | Photo by Juniper Simpson Serrano
Victorian Gothic is a whole mood and The Moors, presented by Riot King Art Market, is playing all the hits. Playwright Jen Silverman’s ode to works of the Brontë sisters—with some Henry James creeping around in there too—luxuriates in its tropes while simultaneously subverting them. There’s an isolated estate, a cunning servant, some strange doings by a man of the house who we never see and a young governess, in from the city, who gets seduced by and entangled in the romantic intrigue! It’s sexy and self-aware, entirely campy, yet surprisingly eerie and poignant—a tonal smorgasbord that hits each contrasting note with impressive dexterity.
Emilie (Blessing Adedijo), the eager young governess, is our point of view character—the only one who, like us, is aware of the strangeness of this household. The man she believes she was corresponding with is absent, his spinster sisters, domineering Agatha (Raquel Duffy) and manic Huldey (Lindsey Middleton), are embroiled in a family drama that she is expected to somehow figure into. Only she remarks on the various rooms she’s brought to—the bedrooms, drawing room and scullery—being, uh, the same as the parlour she’s first welcomed into. The set never changes yet the inhabitants of this manor insist upon reinventing their surroundings and demand Emilie follow suit. Like the fog creeping along the moors, hazy and obscuring, reality is amorphous here.
And thus we, like our heroine, are drawn into contrived, eerily ludicrous and deliciously romantic shenanigans.
As Emilie discovers what her true purpose there is, she and Agatha get to fully unleash all those thinly-veiled lesbian tensions simmering beneath the repressed pageantry of the genre. Under the carefully stylized sincerity of Bryn Kennedy’s direction, Duffy and Adedijo negotiate this stiff-to-sultry dynamic with wit and charisma. Duffy is especially compelling here as a self-assured, matriarchal cipher whose vulnerability is exhilarating when she finally lets her guard down.
Erin Humphry is responsible for many of my laugh-out-loud moments. She’s the maid of the manor—two maids, actually: the scullery maid and the parlour maid, one has a typhus, the other is pregnant, both are schemers. Like the parlour is everywhere gag, the maid is clearly a construct, falling in line with the meta-theatrical artifice of this whole scenario. These characters are consciously willing themselves into a narrative trajectory that’s as genuinely riveting as it is preposterous.
As she proved in Riot King’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, Middleton excels at unhinged, borderline surrealistic portraits of deranged femininity. Spellbinding, hilarious and unnerving—her Huldey is wild-eyed performance art personified. As murderous machinations creep into the plot, her outrageous, show-stopping episode thrusts the already heightened vibes straight into the theatrical stratosphere. It’s here that lighting designer Franco Pang has an opportunity to bust out of the mundane aesthetic with some flashy moves of his own.
Finally, there is a supporting storyline that took a while to pay off for me. I was initially bored by the Mastiff’s heady philosophizing. Yes, there’s a dog here that talks to us, which is meant to be amusing, but I found his pontificating rather banal. I was almost immediately tired on the conceit. Jack Copland’s endearingly gentle portrayal, however, kept me from checking out entirely. His posturing is undeniably cute, especially in the gallant period attire costume designer Madeline Ius has suited him up in.
As his budding romance with an injured, wisely guarded Moor-Hen (Heeyun Park 박희윤) unfolds, I found myself invested in their unlikely union. Park’s quiet playfulness contributes to the sweetness of their dynamic, but their whole deal is tinged with an ominous and aching sense of dread. This, and the human storyline, culminate in a persuasively haunting finale.
While my attention wandered somewhat during the faltering energy of the middle section, I ultimately found The Moors very satisfying—an affectionate homage to a classic literary genre and a clever bit of theatrical mischief. And I loved the whole thing with the diary here—a goofy symbol of narrative craft as self-determining wish-fulfillment.
The Moors
April 3 to April 19, 2026
The Theatre Centre, BMO Incubator
(1115 Queen Street West)
1 hour, 45 minutes (no intermission)
Heeyun Park 박희윤 and Jack Copland in The Moors | Photo by Juniper Simpson Serrano