Theatre season wrap: critics pick their standout moments
La Presse's theatre critics celebrate the 2025-2026 season with picks ranging from a powerful LGBTQ+ collective work to a solo performance that rewrote what's possible on stage.
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The 2025-2026 theatre season is officially closed. La Presse's two lead critics have chosen the performances and works that shaped their year.
Stéphanie Morin singled out "Corps fantômes", a collective creation written by 16 playwrights and performed by 15 actors, as the season's defining moment. Directed by Maxime Carbonneau, the piece chronicles the LGBTQ+ community's darkest hours at the turn of the 1990s—a work she found captivating, devastating, and essential. She also praised Debbie Lynch-White's directorial debut with "L'usure de nos aurores", where carefully placed silence and darkness allowed the drama to hit harder.
For performance, Morin highlighted Rachel Graton's solo turn in "Camera obscura", where Graton played three marginalized women of different generations using only her body and voice—Graton also wrote the text, with every word precisely chosen. She also noted Gabriel Cloutier Tremblay's breakthrough role as Francis in "Corps fantômes", a young, fractured gay writer whose performance suggested a powerful career ahead.
Nathalie Doummar's play "Frères", a gathering of nine men from an Egyptian family navigating love, misunderstanding, and generational clash, earned praise for its tenderness and the rare sight of men on Montreal stages interrogating their own masculinity.
Elisabeth Sirois marked her first major piece with "Nomme-moé", described as a significant revelation from the Conservatoire graduate.
The season reflected diverse voices and storytelling at a moment when theatre remains a space for communities to see themselves reflected on stage.