HOLIDAY IN ZÜRICH

Centaur Theatre presents

HOLIDAY IN ZÜRICH

By Colleen Murphy
Directed by Micheline Chevrier
With Danielle Desormeaux and Brian Dooley
Set, Costume & Prop Design by Julie Vallée-Léger
Lighting Design by Luc Prairie
Stage Manager Danielle Laurin
Assistant Stage Manager Elyse Quesnel

Holiday in Zürich is a tender and darkly funny portrait of life, love, and confronting the inevitable. It follows a happily married Canadian couple in their 70’s, Frank and Clementine (Tiny), as they prepare for a hard-earned, jam-packed trip to Switzerland. Frank is travelling toward the most difficult challenge of his life while Tiny—ever hopeful, and eager for a holiday full of sight-seeing, romance, and European cuisine—holds fast to the idea of the journey as something else entirely. As they pack their suitcases, their different expectations for the trip come into direct and often disarmingly funny collision.

Set almost entirely in their bedroom, the play compresses a lifetime into a single spotlit moment where love is tested, not through grand gestures, but through small negotiations, unspoken fears, and the ways in which ordinary people try imperfectly but bravely to meet the end of things together.

With wit, warmth, and emotional precision, one of English-speaking Canada’s most celebrated playwrights explores what it means to keep choosing each other when time is no longer on your side. Ultimately, Holiday in Zürich is a deeply human story about a couple facing their fate with humour, tenderness, and the messy but miraculous endurance of “The Power of Love” (yes, the Céline Dion reference is very much intended.)

A world premiere starring Montreal theatre luminaries Brian Dooley and Danielle Desormeaux and directed with great insight and nuance by the acclaimed Micheline Chevrier, this new work from Colleen Murphy, two-time Governor General’s Award winner and appointee to the Order of Canada, will resonate across generations, offering anyone who has ever loved and lost a story that is as piercing as it is funny.

*Why You Need to See It*

A heartbreakingly funny and deeply humane portrait of what happens to a couple when time is no longer on their side.