Aisling Murphy

Aisling Murphy is a theatre reporter and critic at The Globe and Mail whose coverage connects new Canadian stage work, awards culture and pop-inflected criticism of how stories play in front of live audiences. She writes about theatre, music and pop culture with the same detailed, conversational style, moving between reviews, reported features and analysis of the systems that shape what gets produced. Her work treats performance as both art and infrastructure, paying attention to creative choices onstage and to the institutions, juries and communities around them.

Dora Awards and the ecology of Toronto stages

Murphy’s reporting on the Dora Awards focuses less on the red-carpet ritual and more on what the jurors’ decisions mean for different kinds of stages, from major commercial productions such as Narnia to small storefront theatres. In her coverage of the Doras, she draws lines between family-oriented blockbusters, experimental work and community-rooted companies, showing how recognition flows across the ecosystem rather than concentrating only on the biggest houses.

That awards writing combines clear explanations of categories and criteria with specific commentary on why certain shows resonate, making the piece useful both to industry insiders and to readers following the scene from the outside. The attention she gives to smaller venues and lesser-known ensembles in that awards context signals a consistent interest in how visibility and resources are distributed in the theatre world.

Criticism of new work and intimate productions

Murphy’s reviews have become part of the way Toronto’s independent companies frame their own work, with producers and theatres regularly pulling out her phrases to promote shows. In her review of Anusree Roy’s Through the Eyes of God, she describes the piece as “magnificent” and “horrific,” capturing both the ambition and the emotional impact of the production in a few sharp words.

When she writes about The Neighbours, she calls it “a gutsy, grisly play about the monster living next door,” a line that reflects her tendency to ground aesthetic judgment in vivid, accessible language.

Companies staging works such as The Drowsy shows at smaller houses turn to her coverage to articulate what their productions are doing formally and thematically, which indicates that her criticism engages closely with dramaturgy, performance style and tone rather than staying at the level of general praise. Across these pieces, she focuses on new writing and intimate-scale productions, often in non-traditional or smaller venues, and treats them with the same seriousness and structural attention that a daily critic might give to large commercial runs.

Theatre, controversy and cultural politics

Beyond straight reviewing, Murphy reports on conflict and controversy in the theatre world, unpacking how artistic decisions intersect with political pressures and community response. In her coverage of the cancellation of The Runner at a theatre in British Columbia, she explains the considerations behind pulling an award-winning play set in Israel, tracing how violence in the Middle East, audience safety concerns and institutional risk management converged on a single production. That piece balances the perspectives of artists, producers and critics, showing how programming choices are judged not only on artistic merit but also on the social climate around them.

By approaching the story as theatre critic and reporter, she combines contextual knowledge of the play’s themes with clear reporting on who made the decision and why, reinforcing a broader through-line in her work: theatre is a public space where politics, identity and narrative are negotiated in real time.

Background in theatre, music and pop-culture journalism

Murphy holds a full-time role as theatre reporter and critic at The Globe and Mail, a position she stepped into in 2025 after several years editing and writing for a theatre-focused magazine. She brings to that beat a portfolio of freelance criticism and features for major outlets, including national and international publications such as The New York Times, CBC Arts and the Baltimore Sun. She is also co-chair of the Toronto Theatre Critics’ Awards, which gives her a structured vantage point on how critical consensus forms around local work and how juries evaluate artistic risk, technical craft and audience impact.

Her peers in the industry have recognized her writing with two Nathan Cohen Awards for Excellence in Critical Writing, underscoring the depth and clarity of her criticism.

Alongside theatre, Murphy has a track record of writing about music and broader pop culture, which adds a distinct flavour to her arts coverage.

She cites British playwright Sarah Kane and mainstream artists such as Taylor Swift among the cultural touchpoints that matter to her, and that range shows up in the way she writes about performance, sound and fandom. In practice, this means a feature on a stage adaptation will be alive to how it speaks to existing fan cultures, how music and sound design shape audience experience, and how a production sits within wider trends in popular entertainment. For communications teams, the result is a critic and reporter who understands both the internal logic of theatre and the external narratives around artists, genres and scenes, and who writes with enough specificity that her pieces can frame how a show is understood long after opening night.