Tim Foley: nutty as ever

Tim Foley did it again. It’s the sixth play that he’s written which has been performed. Yeah, it’s as good as all the others. Ok, maybe not as good. Maybe not as endearing as Scene of the Titans. Or as shocking as Meat. Or as galvanizing as Short Captions for Stick Figures. But it’s good and has charm. In a break from tradition, Goddess of Walnuts is not about LGBTQ issues. Instead, Tim turns to another familiar topic: the theatre.

Goddess of Walnuts tells the story of a famous actress passed her prime (Cara Mahoney) and her conflicted relationship with her dresser – the person dressing actors back stage (Daria Challah). And when the actress is ornery, inebriated, senile and convinced that she’s going to play Cleopatra, being a dresser seems quite the challenge. Both Mahoney and Challah captured their characters brilliantly, shining out from the rather murky corner of the Undercroft, a basement in the medieval History building where the play was performed. It was as louche as it sounds. Siobhan Cannon-Brownlie directed the play with the capability which we have come to expect from her.

The somewhat anticipated Tim Foley tropes were there: the mid-play rant, thing inside another thing—in Meat it was people inside of food, in Short Captions for Stick Figures it was a dick in a box, in the Goddess of Walnuts it was…something inside of an Egyptian statuary—the clever, intelligent humour. There is a running joke throughout the play that Mahoney, playing the delusional actress, keeps bowing to the audience, only to be reminded that the play is not yet over. So when it ended there was no curtain-call and we were all left there just wondering. Was it over? If it really was, did it have to be over? An evening with Tim Foley is too pleasant to last one act of just half an hour. I’m always left wanting more.