Quebec playwright Kemeid’s play, now having its English-language debut at the Stratford Festival, may have premiered almost a decade ago and inspired by a poem over two thousands years old, but its tale of terror and exile feels almost too timely…Rodrigo Beilfuss’s performance here – straightforward, earnest – flattened me with its unspoken pain.

A modern retelling of Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid follows Aeneas, played by an expressive Gareth Potter, as he leads a small group of exiles from their occupied homeland to the promise of a new country. While Virgil’s original poem began with the fall of Troy, Kemeid’s The Aeneid deliberately leaves the country and the people unnamed…When the Stratford Festival commissioned this special translation of Kemeid’s play by Maureen Labonte, the plight of the Syrian refugees had yet to make worldwide headlines, adding to the timeliness and, sadly, timelessness of this production.