Prophetess at Tarragon Theatre: A Masterful Battle of Words and Power

Tarragon Theatre opens its season with the world premiere of Prophetess, written by Ho Ka Kei (Jeff Ho) and directed by Mike Payette. The entire play unfolds over one chaotic day inside a prestigious university English department. At the center is Margaret, the department chair everyone calls “The Queen of Etymology.” Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare’s history plays and the bitter resilience of Queen Margaret, Ho transplants raw classical warfare into modern academia. It starts with office politics, then quickly turns into trench warfare where words get sliced down to their Latin and Greek roots, worn like armor, and thrown like daggers.

Karen Robinson takes the stage first, and she sets the tone the very second she steps out. There is no gentle easing into the story. With an arresting opening monologue, she plunges the entire house straight into a dark, spine-chilling coldness. Robinson is not playing for easy pity. Through razor-sharp enunciation and vivid facial expressions, she brings Margaret’s deep insecurity, desperation, and internal chaos to life. You hear the friction in her voice, caught between what she desperately needs to say and what gets choked back. In just a few minutes, Robinson lays bare decades of quiet paranoia and bottled grief, establishing an ominous baseline that hangs over the entire performance.

Nobody writes hurt and anger quite like Jeff Ho. His characters do not just scream at each other, they fight in complicated layers. The dialogue crackles with relentless wordplay and etymological digging, showing how rhetoric shapes what we believe, builds our defenses, and manipulates everyone around us. Margaret lives by one rule: “As long as you have the power of words, you will be fine.”

Yet beneath that armor, Ho’s understanding of Shakespeare runs deep. He does not copy Queen Margaret. He absorbs her entire essence into Professor Margaret’s bloodstream, completely unforced. What hits even harder is how Ho writes the quiet aftermath of a broken relationship. The lingering shockwaves and the exhaustion following a blowout carry an ancient Daoist truth: fortune rests upon disaster, and disaster lurks within good fortune (禍兮福所倚，福兮禍所伏). Every sharp verbal win plants the seed of ruin, and every curse eventually bounces straight back onto the speaker.

On stage, it is three powerhouse women going head to head. Robinson plays the insecure diva clinging to her fading pedestal with terrifying precision. Beside her, Christine Horne is chilling as the corporate climber, hiding cold-blooded calculation behind smooth smiles and polite departmental small talk.

Then there is Natasha Mumba. Her Anne starts out bright, curious, and genuinely admiring of the older women, the way younger academics often are. Then she realizes she has been used as a pawn. Watch Mumba’s face as the reality lands, and that early adoration turns into boiling venom. When she reaches her breaking point of hysterical accusation, shouting that she will outlive them to see them rot, the sheer fury hits with such force that the room holds its breath.

Visually, the space does a lot of heavy lifting. Jawon Kang frames the set with dark wood paneling and luminous, stained-glass style windows, giving the stage the quiet dignity of a cathedral. But as the fighting escalates, graphic projections of spiderwebs creep across the wood, turning the room dim and withered. The rot was never coming from outside, because it was growing behind the walls the whole time.

Logan Raju Cracknell’s lighting tracks that decay step for step. After exhausting rounds of verbal slaughter, a single beam cuts across the actors like sudden divine grace, pulling the audience through an intense emotional arc from quiet academic calm into abrasive conflict, finally landing in a rare space of revelation and release.

Prophetess runs now through October 25 at Tarragon Theatre (Mainspace).

Prophetess