Acclaimed British play Pomona launches Toronto production
There is a hole. A hole in the middle of the city.
Toronto will be in the grip of Cthulhu when, on November 1st, ARC invites audiences down the rabbit hole for the North American premiere of Alistair McDowall’s critically-acclaimed Lovecraft-influenced urban horror story Pomona.
The fourth play from rising UK star Alistair McDowall, Pomona was commissioned for The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 2014 and performed at The Gate Theatre in London as part of the NEW festival of plays. It then went on to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, South West London, in November 2014. The production was a critical success and was featured in Lyn Gardner’s Top 10 Theatre of 2014 in The Guardian. She cited the play’s humor and moral ambiguity, and called it “a dark, fractured and deeply unsettling theatrical weapon.”
The Toronto production will be performed by ARC Resident artists Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Liza Balkan, Deborah Drakeford, Carlos González-Vío, Ryan Hollyman, Andre Sills, and Bahareh Yaraghi, and directed by ARC Artistic Producer Christopher Stanton.
The play centers on a young woman named Ollie. In a desperate search for her missing sister, she finds all roads lead to Pomona – a very real abandoned concrete island at the heart of Manchester that has become the stuff of urban legend. Sometimes referred to as the lost island of Pomona, the slim stretch of land used to be home to a bustling docklands but now is isolated and in ruin. As she comes closer to revealing the dark truth, the fabric of her own life becomes twisted into a strange loop until she can no longer be sure what is fantasy, what is myth, and what is the very real result of a society conditioned to look the other way in the face of human evil.
Pomona will be on stage in Toronto from November 1 to November 19, 2016. (Opening night: November 3). Single tickets are available from $19 to $34, and can be purchased here. For more information visit arcstage.com.
