Cast of World on Fire | Photo provided by the company
I understand the fraught humanity that writer-director George F. Walker is wrestling with here. Yes, there are many people who are not ok. We all have our unique, bumpy journeys, of course, ebbing and flowing with circumstances both in our control and out of it, but there are some whose not ok-ness is prolonged and especially wretched. World on Fire is about those folks and the system that looks after them—or doesn’t. At the centre of Walker’s play is an overworked social worker named Jules (Elizabeth Friesen) who cares very deeply about her little collection of suffering humans.
World on Fire is… well… there are bits and pieces here that I quite like, especially in concept. It pains me to report, though, that it’s not a very good play, made more irksome by clunky execution. At first, I thought it felt more solid than his previous effort, Syndrome, but the more I think about it, the less I appreciate the… choices.
I found Friesen the most convincing throughout, with her haggard yet empathetic persistence. She’s also the only one who continually breaks the fourth wall, taking us into her confidence. This self-aware aspect of the play is particularly inconsistent and rather perplexing. She and one other character are aware of and acknowledge us, but other characters do not, one even calls out Jules’ talking to us as if she’s speaking to empty air in his reality. If there’s a logic to this, Walker hasn’t clarified it.
The people in Jules’ orbit are:
A fellow staff member in this hospital ward, the obnoxious Dr. Emilio (Alex Clay), whom the show page describes bafflingly as “a charmer with a prescription pad,” who struts around as a sort of cartoonish parody of a medical professional.
David (Dave Huband), an elderly man whose Holocaust-survivor parents tried to kill him during their suicide pact and who just wants to finish the job.
Marius (Chris Peterson) exists as a single gag—he’s afraid of everything.
Casey (Anne van Leeuwen) is a social activist and encampment resident who has an especially abject backstory involving kidnapping and rape and whose trauma has turned her into a sort of pitiful clown.
Annie (Marline Yan) is the youngest of this community, the angriest, and most vitriolic, with her own awful past, having been on the streets since she was an adolescent.
These people pop in and out of the continuous action scenario as it fluctuates wildly between farce and hard-hitting drama—not landing very well on either. It’s all pretty hokey and uneven, though I occasionally chuckled and did sincerely want to invest in these people. Eventually, they all come together in a group session that becomes full-on comedic before eventually resolving itself in an appeal to the audience that wants to be poignant, but hasn’t earned it.
I can vibe with dark, tragi-comic scenarios, but those vibes are off here. I sense Walker’s appreciation for, perhaps, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rattling about in this scenario, but there is something strained and discomfiting about the way he’s theatricalized trauma and mental illness. I don’t mean he’s making fun of these people, but there just isn’t enough subtext or insight to sell the intended human complexity or the tonal wackiness.
The minimal, disparate elements of the set are credited to Madeleine Rosenberg, Daniel Rosenberg and Nicholas Friesen. The chairs, bench and divider, though inelegant, serve their function well enough. I’m not sure who specifically is responsible for the backdrop. The stylized panels of bowed heads, each with an expressive, conceptual emblem—question marks, thought bubbles, exclamation marks and arrows—are a bit silly. I get it, of course, but it’s serving elementary school classroom more than thematic expression.
This was an unpleasant review to write because I sense everyone involved has their heart in the right place.
World on Fire
May 27 to June 7, 2026
The Assembly Theatre
(1479 Queen Street West)
70 minutes
World on Fire logo | Image provided by the company