Theatre review: The Drawer Boy

In 1972, a Canadian theatre company sent its actors out to various Ontario farms, to spend the summer working there and observing life in order to create a devised play. The resulting piece was considered a seminal part of Canadian theatre-making, but Michael Healey's gentle but compelling 1999 play The Drawer Boy imagines how that summer's research might have affected both the actors, and the farmers whose lives it put under the spotlight. Miles (Simon Lee Phillips,) a young actor, is taken in at a farm occupied by two elderly men, once childhood friends who went on to fight in World War II together. Angus (John Bett) received an injury that left him with a metal plate in his head, migraines and a memory that can hold on to almost nothing except numbers. Morgan (Neil McCaul) tends to the farm, looks after his friend, and nightly tells him a fairytale version of their lives, Angus' war injury and the English girls they loved and lost.