Adele Thomson

This is a very biased review. But how could it not be? I love Kathryn Haggis. I just met her, three days ago. She was getting her hair done in my friend’s salon, and I overheard her talking about her one-woman show, Lifeguard, and that she needed someone to rehearse with. I love inserting myself in other people’s business, and so almost immediately, I let myself be pulled deep into her world.

Seeing her opening performance of Lifeguard- written and performed by Haggis, directed by Tracey Erin Smith, and staged at Native Earth Performing Arts Centre for the 2026 Fringe Festival- felt less like watching a show than being let in on a life.

This means I did not come into Lifeguard cleanly. I had already been given the strange privilege of being near the work before seeing it in front of an audience. I had heard pieces of Kathryn’s stories before I knew where they belonged. I had already felt how quickly she can pull a person in.

So maybe I am not the most objective person to write about this show. But opening night made clear that the pull I felt in the salon was not accidental. Lifeguard wades in and out of Kathryn’s life, sometimes poolside or riverbed, sometimes in a diner or bar, sometimes in a hospital room, and sometimes in that strange space between memory and performance, where grief becomes funny only because the alternative is unbearable. The play does not move in a straight line. It circles back. It repeats. It swims laps. A story that first seems like a funny lifeguarding anecdote returns later with more weight behind it.

On its surface, Lifeguard is about lifeguarding. Kathryn tells us about the pool and the authority that comes with sitting in the chair. But lifeguarding becomes the frame for almost everything else. What does it mean to watch? What does it mean to be responsible for another person’s body? What does it mean to know what drowning sounds like?

The best thing about Kathryn’s performance is how little she asks us to feel for her. She is funny first. Every beat drew out laughter, groans, and those little murmured sounds an audience makes when they recognize something deep in their minds. And then the laugh would catch. Kathryn would pause, or her face would shift, or the rhythm of the story would change, and the room would realize it had been led somewhere much heavier than expected. Kathryn does not present herself as some noble figure standing above everyone else in the lifeguard chair. She is also the daughter, the sister, the actor, the worker, the person in the water.

Tracey Erin Smith’s direction is not showy, which feels right. A more aggressively staged production might have gotten in the way of Kathryn’s particular gift, which is making a room feel like she is just telling you a story until you realize the story has been carefully carrying you somewhere. Smith lets the piece stay conversational without becoming shapeless. The show moves like memory, but it does not drift aimlessly.

The production itself is simple, but it does not feel empty. Kathryn does most of the staging with her body. Her eyes scan the audience the way a lifeguard scans a pool. She changes just enough to move us from chair, to bar, to hospital room, to riverbank. She does not need much to tell us where we are. The show depends on the act of watching, and at times it really does feel like we are the water in front of her.

The music cues are not subtle, but I don’t think they are trying to be. They work the way old songs work in memory: sometimes sentimental, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes suddenly carrying a lot more meaning than they should. They help place us in time without making the show feel trapped in chronology. The songs let Kathryn jump from one part of her life to another before the audience has time to brace for it.

As an opening night performance, the room felt especially present. The audience was allowed to react, and Kathryn met those reactions with ease. There is something fitting about watching a show about lifeguarding that still feels like it is paying close attention to the room it is in.

Kathryn collects people. The room tonight felt full of them: the people literally sitting there for her, and the people she carried onto the stage with her. Her father, her mother, her sister, coworkers, swimmers, bar regulars, strangers, the living and the dead — all held together by her attention. This is maybe the real lifeguarding of the show: not only pulling bodies from water, but refusing to let people disappear. She watches them. She remembers them. She gives them back to us.

By the end, Lifeguard is not just about lifeguarding, or water, or the strange collection of jobs one person can survive. It is about the quiet responsibility of paying attention to other people. It is about how much of life depends on someone noticing when another person has gone under.

I went in biased. I still am. I love this show. But maybe that is not a failure of this review. Maybe it is the point. Lifeguard is a show about being pulled into other people’s lives, about watching closely, about the ways we try to save each other, and the ways we carry each other when we cannot.