REVIEW: Sufficient Merit at Canal Cafe Theatre from 16 - 20 September 2026

‘The play’s kernel is good but the excess needs cutting away.’ ★★★

Actors love playing actors, full stop. But they love even more to play the skint actor who is struggling to find a job and is late on their rent. After all, it’s an experience which most people in the profession must go through as a rite of passage. And Sufficient Merit, a new play by three such writer-performers, harping magically on this ancient theme is inspired - we are told so clearly by the marketing - by “true events” of this kind.

Upbeat, filled with fiery actor crash-outs found bemoaned in monologues about the theatrical profession, this work is most wonderful when it’s most wacky and on the nose. “Imagine losing to AI because your own writing was too shitty,” says one member of the theatre troupe (Emma Paige Baker), maddened by her day job and unable to face the fact that their small theatre venue is being shut down to make a data centre. For yes, we are in the age of AI, which dawns, to now destroy even the small theatre that these three actors run to just keep their hand in the game.

Yet, we are also in the realm of ‘Theatre’ with a capital T. T’ai Hartley, playing the trio’s only male appears telling us in soliloquy about the time he sacrificed his third nipple to the Greek gods of theatre to make it in the acting world. Clearly granting his wish, a miracle helps Hartley land a role with none other than director Martin Scorsese by the play's end. We are buoyed along in these throws of such anxiety, elemental passion, offerings from the divine and the slow digital creep of AI sweeping the very foundations of these thespians' lifestyle away.

An opening scene is a particular treat and rounded off with cunning, startling the audience when we learn this work will not be a Western, ruled by gun-slingers, after all. But the writing can plod along, stuttering in sequences and over-the-top costumes that need to be carefully considered with the play’s heavier themes.

The play’s kernel is good but the excess needs cutting away, the pained wonder of the acting profession is enough in this piece. In a striking moment half way through, Hartley’s face sours into a desperate indifference with his acting career. If “he could just fail” and know that the gods were telling him “no” and confirm they were “going in a different direction”, then he could give up in peace. But his hopeless eyes - begging for a break - still look to the audience as if by some divine authority we could give him what he wants.

Sufficient Merit at Canal Cafe Theatre from 16 - 20 September 2026

BOX OFFICE: https://canalcafetheatre.com/our-shows/sufficient-merit/

CREATIVES:

Written by T’ai Hartley, Alia Lahlou, Emma Piage Baker and Eleanor Dunlop

Directed by Eleanor Dunlop and Emily Serdahl

CAST:

T’ai Hartley

Alia Lahlou

Emma Paige Baker

Photography credit: Shira Klasmer.