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Anton Ling and Karl Ang in Cockroach.Joy von Tiedemann/Courtesy of Tarragon Theatre
- Title: Cockroach
- Written by: Ho Ka Kei (Jeff Ho)
- Director: Mike Payette
- Actors: Steven Hao, Karl Ang, Anton Ling
- Company: Tarragon Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Oct. 9, 2022
Critic’s Pick
The Tarragon Theatre impressively began its metamorphosis from one artistic director’s era to the next with the world premiere of Cockroach on Thursday night.
This poetic and often quite funny new work about survival by Ho Ha Kei (also known as Jeff Ho) is getting an accomplished production directed by Mike Payette, who took over from Richard Rose as leader of the Toronto new-work theatre company during the pandemic. It officially launches Payette’s first full season of programming.
Cockroach begins with a fantastic, in all senses of the word, monologue by Cockroach (the captivating Steven Hao), who is, in fact, a cockroach. He tells the audience he was conceived by his parents at a Whitney Houston concert in the United States but was born in Hong Kong after being transported there as an egg in one of the diva’s wigs.
Cockroach may skitter around rather than go in a straight line - but Payette’s staging has enough kinetic energy to give the show constant momentum.Joy von Tiedemann/Courtesy of Tarragon Theatre
The only survivor of 13 siblings who were not long for this world as a result of a tragic power-washing incident, Cockroach relates the first years of his life in the city of lights (he’s aghast that dingy Paris shares that nickname with Hong Kong) and a tragic romance with a lobster.
But he also has a lot to say about humans – and the offensive way in which they use his name to dehumanize other humans. (Most recently, in the Hong Kong protests in 2019, police there began referring to pro-democracy protesters as “cockroaches”.)
The next character to take centre stage is the Bard (Karl Ang) – and, while I hate to spoil the surprise, he turns out to be The Bard himself, that is, William Shakespeare. He has been summoned in spectral form by the use of one of the expressions he coined by someone in distress.
He’s definitely boastful about his accomplishments, but also begrudges the fact that he’s so embedded in the English language – and that the English language is so widespread in the world now – that he cannot ever be at peace.
Why these two characters share a stage has to do with Cockroach’s third character, a 17-year-old called Boy (Anton Ling), of whom we know only certain sketchy details. He seems to have come to Canada from Hong Kong at a young age and, at some point, says he stopped dreaming in Cantonese and started dreaming in English.
Despite gleefully embracing Shakespeare and his language, Boy is harassed on the subway in Toronto and told to “Go home.” On his grandmother’s photo wall back “home,” meanwhile, he is the only grandchild not to have a spot.
While Ho’s play is on one level about the fracturing of identity caused by immigration, assimilation and colonialism, Cockroach also has a mystery at its centre. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place to reveal a heartbreaking incident involving the boy in Montreal.
The eternality of the cockroach, the endurance of the words of Shakespeare, these are things that the boy learns survival skills from. There’s more method to the madness of the play’s form than is initially apparent.
Cockroach may skitter around rather than go in a straight line – but Payette’s staging has enough kinetic energy to give the show constant momentum.
There’s no stand-and-deliver soliloquizing; all three actors are always active participants in creating a world onstage through Hanna Kiel’s choreography, which has them fully scampering up and down and all over Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s set. (It looks a little bit like a nearby subway station – and has climbing wall grips attached that allow the actors to creepy-crawl all over it.)
The three actors are always active participants in creating a world onstage through Hanna Kiel’s choreography, which has them fully scampering up and down and all over Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s set.Joy von Tiedemann/Courtesy of Tarragon Theatre
Like the boy in his play, Ho was born in Hong Kong and later came to Canada – and his connection to Shakespeare is deep enough that he’s currently in the United States on tour playing Ophelia in Why Not’s bilingual production of Prince Hamlet (English and ASL).
His playfulness with language and ability to come at sentences from original angles is shared by many of the great exophonic writers, a term sometimes used to describes those who write in a second language (whether they’ve lost their mother tongue or maintain it).
Cockroach, in sections, felt to me like a cousin of a Quebecois classic, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi – a disorienting play about identity with a central entomological metaphor that the French-language playwright Larry Tremblay wrote in English in 1995.
You can detect, too, a hit of Quebec stage style too in ex-Montrealer Payette’s fine premiere production which – with its trio of actors making exceptional Tarragon debuts – gives off all the right signals of continuity, change and confidence as the theatre company heads into its next chapter.