A small collection of reviews after the first nights of Rattle:
Rattle: Root Sky Theatre Company
Curtains Up Winnipeg, Jun. 6, 2026
“One of the most effective contrasts in the piece is between the ways that Bobbie and Dan have dealt with their sixties scoop experience. Initially it seems like Dan has moved on from what he went through, got his papers and is now fighting the good fight. On the other hand, Bobbie struggles to be alone and refuses to look at her documents. As it goes on, this simple dichotomy gets muddied very quickly.
The through line is that all this personal emotional damage is the direct responsibility of the Canadian government, who doesn’t have to be there as individuals sort through the ways this has impacted their lives. Bureaucracy is a matter of cold impersonal paperwork, but the ways in which it impacts people’s lives is messy, painful and excruciating and most importantly re-traumatizing. Rattle calls for a more compassionate way of offering healing and reparations to survivors. Offering compensation is ineffective when it means that the person has to go through it again.”
“Finding family, finding truth”
Winnipeg Free Press, Jun. 1, 2026 (Ben Waldman)
Fateful interactions with the next generation and her ancestors help Bobbie find her truth, she adds. “In that moment it’s her healing moment, you can really feel that part of the play where she found her place,” adds Melanie Badger [Bobbie], an actor whose most recent performance was in 2019, in Theatre by the River’s The Hours That Remain.
Badger’s first performance was in Douglas Nepinak’s Crisis in Oka, Manitoba. That play — staged at Prairie Theatre Exchange last year as part of the second annual Kiyanaan Festival, produced by Van Buekenhout and Philip Geller — has served as an inspiration for both Lakevold and Racine.
“I’d like to think of it as blood memory as an actor, that’s the choice I made (in approaching the role of Bobbie), is that instant connection to her mother, her memory, her roots, her place,” says Badger, who works for the Winnipeg Foundation and Manitobah Storyboot School, a national charity offering cultural craftmaking workshops.