Antidote for Life: Memory, Madness, and Beagles

By Bernadine Stapleton | LSPU Hall | Feb. 27-Mar. 2, 2025 | Tickets here

Reviewed by Terry Doyle

“Nobody ever made a play about forgetting.”

Well, Bernadine Stapleton has, it’s called Antidote For Life: Memory, Madness, and Beagles, 

a new one-woman-show in which there are numerous references to the rule of threes. For instance, Wanda from Beagle Paws tells us that for dogs the rule of threes goes: Do I eat it? Do I roll in it? Or do I forgive it? If you forget to buy tickets I’m sure Berni will forgive you, but you should really consider booking them right now. I’ll wait. Go here, then come back and read on.

Antidote For Life is a beautiful show about stories, stories remembered and forgotten, a show that references Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Prine, and, a personal favourite of mine, the novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge, which feels like a cousin of Antidote For Life, but if you miss the opportunity to see this show that is equal parts vulnerable and hilarious, I fear you might not forgive yourself. 

I suppose it’s possible that you might not know that Bernadine Stapleton is a Siminovitch Prize winner who has had almost forty plays professionally produced in Canada and beyond. Berni has spent her career making beautiful theatre in unexpected places. She is one of this province’s most celebrated artists, and for good reason. 

If you are familiar with Berni’s previous work it might interest you to know that Antidote For Life is the third installment in a trilogy of plays, the first two being Woman in a Monkey Cage, and Offensive to Some.

Antidote For Life: Memory, Madness, and Beagles is about waking up alive and celebrating every day. It opens on a patchwork quilt, sewn by a dearly remembered grandmother. And the play itself functions similarly – sewn together with patches of memory; stories that the artist relays in a different order every night, decided by cues written on a deck of cards. The centerpiece of the play is “the best worst time” of the global pandemic, when the artist’s fate became entwined with her beagle, Georgie Girl. And from this centre springs stories involving ghosts, a traffic cop on the corner of Prescott and Duckworth Street, a late aunt who chain smoked menthols and was prone to delightful malapropisms, Wanda from Beagle Paws, and, at the heart of it all, an actor who is exploring what it means to age. All the lines from all the plays she has performed make up a patchwork of memory. There is no show without actors; each play lives and dies based on what the actors can commit to memory. But what happens when an actor forgets?

In Bernadine Stapleton’s case, she has created something magical from it.

Antidote For Life: Memory, Madness, and Beagles is playing on the main stage at the LSPU Hall from Feb 27 to March 2. There is a live stream performance on Saturday, March 1 for folks who may not be able to attend in person, and on March 2 there is a relaxed performance which also features multiple accessibility options including ASL interpretation and live audio description.

We are very fortunate in this province to have storytellers of the caliber of Bernadine Stapleton. Theatre’s magic comes partly from its ephemerality; it lives on chiefly in memory. 

Antidote For Life is a show you won’t soon forget.