Magpie, Having, Hunger Striking

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Kit Brennan is the award-winning author of nine plays. This collection
of three of her plays confirms her status as the brightest star among
the younger generation of Canadian playwrights.

The chief protagonist in Magpie is Bernice, a middle-aged woman prone
to fantasies. When a young and gifted dance instructor arrives in her
small town, Bernice’s humdrum life is thrown into disarray. The men in
her life—her husband, doctor, and evangelist preacher—cannot keep
her in the confines of her reality, and she transcends even her own
fantasy world into a place that is more exciting than life. Intensely
theatrical, like all Brennan’s plays, Magpie is a tour de force for
the senses and a superb piece of writing.

Having dramatizes our materialistic society and juxtaposes it with the
motifs of the highwayman. This cultural symbiosis places into stark
relief contemporary lives full of ambition and self-destruction with the
fight for freedom and control.

Hunger Striking is the most personal and touching of the three plays.
Sarah’s student, Katie, has died of anorexia. Her death acts as a
catalyst, thrusting Sarah into her own memories: her own experience with
anorexia; her Celtic past, redolent with mythology; and the world of
hunger-striking suffragettes. Multiple memories inform one another in a
breathtaking swirl of theatrical imagery that is both visceral and
cerebral.