The hippo scene is the first moment in Emil Sher's drama Mourning Dove when the audience is put on notice that all lazy and off-the-shelf moral judgments about Robert Latimer and why he killed his severely disabled daughter must be set aside.

The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes said the dramatist should not only offer pleasure "but should, besides that, be a teacher of morality and a political adviser." T. S. Eliot decided to bring his poetry to the stage because he believed that no art form could better articulate the core truths of human experience than poetic drama.

The Brazilian stage director Augusto Boal, in his book Theatre of the Oppressed, says, "Nature, according to Aristotle, tends to perfection, which does not mean that it always attains it. The body tends to health, but it can become ill." It is the purpose of art, Boal writes, to examine the disconnect between ideal and reality.

In an interview, GCTC artistic director Lorne Pardy, sitting on the set of Mourning Dove, laments that that sort of theatre "has become a little unfashionable" against the vogue genre of big-stage spectacles and tinsel song-and-dance shows. He looks out at his darkened, empty theatre in Ottawa's west end and says: "Artistic directors are under pressure to fill seats... although, funny enough, I think this is an easy sell."

Sher's script, Pardy says, gives him the opportunity to present an understanding of human emotions.

"We have to look at [our] emotional responses in order to think things through. And that is the responsibility of theatre -- to present human society in a way that makes it almost impossible not to engage with it."

Sher's script, Pardy says, gives him the opportunity to present an understanding of human emotions.

With Sher's script, Pardy's directing and the competence of actors Timothy Webber (Doug), Kate Hurman (his wife Sandra), Stephanie Burchell (an off-stage Tina) and Ben Meuser (whose astonishing performance as Keith won him an instant standing ovation from invited guests at a final dress rehearsal earlier this week), it may indeed be impossible to sit through Mourning Dove and not re-examine one's judgment of Robert Latimer...

They offer no guidance whatsoever toward reaching moral consensus on Latimer's act. Why? Because there is none. They merely illustrate how complex the responses of the human heart and human soul are, and lead the audience into a deeper understanding of Latimer's behaviour.

Maybe this sort of theatre should be more fashionable.