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    ISBN: 9780889224810 | Paperback

    128 pages | Pub. Date: 20030915
    5.5 W × 8.5 H × 0.35 D inches
    Backlist | Drama | Bisac: DRA013000
    Rights: WORLD

    Or find Girl in the Goldfish Bowl in your local bookstore

As Morris Panych’s latest comedy opens, we hear Iris, a precocious girl of ten, saying: “These are the last few days of my childhood.” The death of her goldfish, Amal, she is sure, has been announced by the air-raid sirens during the day’s school drill. For Iris, there remain a few more days of life in a universe that is inherently ordered, where the spirit of her departed and ritually interred goldfish can, of course, be re-incarnated in a lost and amnesiac drifter given to rhetorical questions of seemingly deep philosophical import.

Iris’s terminally depressed parents, trapped within the nostalgic desires of their own lost youth, are oblivious to how the child’s eye view of their daughter works and what it sees. They remember too well their own loss of innocence as they abandoned themselves to the existential chaos of adulthood. The middle-aged family boarder has spent years in a frustrated search for any kind of gratification, immediate or otherwise, at the Legion after a full day’s work in the fish cannery.

It is into the goldfish bowl of this dysfunctional family of lethargic piranhas, existential bottom-feeders and aggressive guppies that the audience peers with incredulity, acute recognition, hysterical laughter, and an overwhelming sense of the creative healing power of the imagination.

Cast of three women and two men.

Winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Drama.

Winner 2002 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Play or Musical: Large Theatre (

Winner 2003 Dora Mavor Moore Award General Theatre: Outstanding New Play (Tarragon Theatre)

Winner 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama

“Arguably Morris Panych’s best play to date.”
Canadian Literature

“An uncommon, quirky blend of humour and compassion.”
National Post

“A quirky cocktail consisting of equal parts Pinter, Orton, and Disney, shaken by author-director Morris Panych in his own distinctive style.”
— Richard Ouzounian, Variety

By Morris Panych

Playwright, actor and director Morris Panych has been described as “a man for all seasons in Canadian theatre.” He has appeared in over fifty theatre productions and in numerous television and film roles. He has directed more than ninety productions and written over a dozen plays that have been translated and produced throughout the world. He has twice won the Governor General’s Award and has won the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award fourteen times for acting and directing. He has also been nominated six times for Toronto’s Dora Mavor Moore Award and three times for the Chalmers Award. His classic 7 Stories ranks 9th among the ten best selling plays in Canada, outselling the Coles version of Romeo & Juliet.

Read more about Morris Panych


news | 2013-04-16
Girl in the Goldfish Bowl Down Under!

…one of Canada’s most acclaimed playwrights, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl is hilarious, yet heart breaking. The … the absurdity, pain and beauty of growing up. Girl in the Goldfish Bowl runs April 18 – 4 May 2013 at the Bakehouse …


news | 2011-03-18
Talon Drama at the 2011 Quontas!

…Guild for a production of Morris Panych‘s Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. …