Sunday Feature: Interview with Alison Darcy on Scapegoat Carnivale's Othello

(photo by Sabrina Reeves)

Creating her path, one step at a time.  

by David Sklar

Alison Darcy is a  National Theatre School of Canada graduate and the Co- Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Scapegoat Carnivale Theatre. As well as directing, producing, teaching theatre, Ms Darcy has been acting professionally since childhood. Some of her directorial works include Faust and The Heretics of Bohemia (Segal/ Scapegoat), Hyena Subpoena (Catkidd/scapegoat), Medea and Life is a Dream (Centaur/Scapegoat), Things are bad-Ijumpile Lendaba (South Africa's Mopo Productions/Scapegoat), Last Call (scapegoat/NCTF/Uno festival), Real Estate (Centaur), Bash: Latterday plays (Muttertung), The Unknown Citizen (Project Porte Parole), and Burning Cage (Woman Alone). Selected acting credits include roles in Age of Arousal (Centaur), A Doll House (Saidye), Bye Bye Baby (Imago/Centaur), Brahm and the Angel (Geordie), Speak Easy (Sabooge), Bash: Latterday plays (Muttertung), Small Returns (Infinitheatre/November), girls!girls!girls! (Theatro Commanici/FTA), Taking Sides (Centaur), and various film and television productions. She has worked closely with Clyde Henry Productions, the Festival TransAmériques, Blue Metropolis, and South Africa's Mopo Productions. She is a multiple MECCA award winner, as well as recipient of awards from Montreal, Vancouver, and Seattle fringes.

CHARPO: How did your acting career begin?  

DARCY: I started when I was eight. I did a show at the Centaur because my dad (Maurice Podbrey) needed kids in a play and so a bunch of my friends and I took part. Some casting agents saw the show just by chance and wanted me to be in the movie, “The Hotel New Hampshire”. My brother got an actual part and I was a glorified extra. But that started me off and one day I was at school and another casting agent was looking for kids for this movie called, “The Peanut Butter Solution” and they just picked me based on my look, I think, to audition. I got the third lead: they didn’t know I had had any previous experience. They were doing a hunt across Canada. 

I did a few plays but mostly film until about CEGEP when I started getting more interested in theatre and then decided to apply and I got in to NTS (National Theatre School) in 1992. After graduating I took four years off to travel and ended up living in Europe, in London, and finally came back home to start directing. In 2003, I met Joseph Shragge (co-artistic and co-founder) and later Melanie St-Jacques and by 2006 we started Scapegoat Carnivale. In 2007, David Oppenheim and Andreas Apergis came on board and we became the company. Since graduating, I’ve also been teaching classes. I work with various organizations such as Blue Metropolis, Festival TransAmérique and NTS, while all the while promoting anglo-theatre in this city.  

In a Word... Alison Darcy, co-artistic director of Scapegoat Carnivale, on Faust

It contains EVERYTHING

Alison Darcy is co-artistic director of Scapegoat Carnivale in Montreal, as well as an actor who has appeared at most of the city's main and secondary houses.

CHARPO:  Why Faust, especially this Faust which is a monster (and you're doing bits of both volumes!!) when you could do Marlowe?

DARCY: Why Faust? 

That’s another one of those questions, like why Greek mythology. 

And the same answer applies, because it contains EVERYTHING.

Marlowe’s Faust is a great story about a man who sells his soul to the devil. 

Goethe’s Faust is an epic work that took him 57 years to complete; it contains mythical characters from throughout time and space, it envelops one man’s entire imagination and touches on every major theme that life offers us. It is akin to doing all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the bible, or Gulliver’s travels, the odyssey and Don Quixote all in one. 

The Sunday Read: Alison Darcy on Scapegoat Carnivale's Bacchae

intense, dramatic, harsh and notoriously hard to stage

Alison Darcy is a living legacy. She has gone far beyond being the daughter of directors Maurice Podbrey (Centaur founder) and Elsa Bolam (Geordie founder) to becoming one of the finest director/artistic director/actors in the country. Her company, Scapegoat Carnivale, scored huge with their production of Medea, and is once again tackling the Greeks with The Bacchae.

CHARPO: What is your role for this production?

DARCY: My role this time around is solely as producer. It is my first time stepping out of a Scapegoat production creatively. It's a super odd feeling for me. I haven't even been to the rehearsals yet.

CHARPO: The Greeks again...why?

DARCY: We're not done with them. There's too much good stuff there. Andreas and Joe [Shragge, co-translator and co-director for the production] felt compelled to do the script and eager to do another translation of Euripides because he was such a master of pure theatre. Also I think their idea to set it during the Great Awakening is inspired. And we had such a great reception to Medea, I think Montreal audiences are excited to see new interpretations of classics, especially ones not often done. The Greeks are the originators of Western theatre, these are our fairy tales, the founding of the Judeo-Christian theology and our society. What better well to pull from? Maybe a trilogy could be in the making.

First-Person: Alison Darcy on Hyena Subpoena

Cat Kidd and Geoff Agombar in South Africa

The Smiling White Mice
Going to Africa to find a way home
by Alison Darcy


It was such a strange thing to see Cat and Geoff in SA.

They had recently been described by a storyteller/teacher to her elementary students in a small township near the bush as two smiling white mice with sunburns.

And there they were, smiling at me, on the second floor balcony of a bar on Long Street in Cape Town. I had always liked these two.