Despite a terrific ice storm, two hospitals locked down for SARS, the tourists staying home and actors vanishing on opening night due to personal calamities, the World Stage Festival went bravely on in true show-biz tradition. World Stage is Toronto’s April theater festival, gathering important, often experimental productions from all over the world to perform on various stages in the city, but focused at Harbourfront Centre, an arts complex on the shores of Lake Ontario.

There were shows from Poland, South Africa, Belgium, England, Scotland, the U.S. and, of course, Canada. In addition to 16 mainstage productions, there were small productions of brand-new plays, master classes with famous directors, concerts, films and art exhibitions. This year the big hit was The Mysteries, a South African staging of the medieval mystery plays, and the big ticket ($125) was Tamara, a play-in-a-mansion, follow-the-characters show complete with wine and cookies.

The monthlong festival is designed for the Toronto audience; going up for a long weekend, I was able to see five plays, luckily catching both the biggies above. I missed The Notebook/The Proof, a double bill from Belgium's Der Onderneming about twin brothers who may be one person, where nothing is trustworthy, especially one's eyes. There was also much buzz about a show that had not yet opened: Kafka in Love, a "water opera" in a pool, with Hungarian music, aquatic ballet and a design inspired by Chagall paintings.

Magnetism of the Heart, performed in Polish with English surtitles. A company of actors very skilled in physical theater perform a deconstructed version of an old chestnut of a play about love; if, however, you don't know the original, the joke is somewhat lost, combined with the exhausting up-and-downing to read the dialogue while also watching the action. The result was hilarious to some people (many of whom seemed to be speaking Polish) and stupefying to others (i.e., me).

Gagarin Way, by Scotland's Gregory Burke, performed by a Canadian company with fierce Scottish accents, is an impressive and amusing import from the Edinburgh Fringe and London's National. This nasty/funny play is about two disgruntled warehouse workers who want to make a political statement by kidnapping a CEO; there's an amazing riff on Genet and Sartre, but the whole show goes on too long, losing its punch through repetition.

Outlying Islands, by David Greig, also from Scotland, has two young ornithologists arriving on a remote island in 1939 to study the birds, only to discover that the British government plans to use the place to test anthrax as a weapon. The introductory premise is promising: "Some force draws us to outlying islands -- the more outlying the island, the stronger the force," but it quickly gets bogged down in huge issues the playwright is unprepared to handle: the relation between war and science, the relation between opportunism and idealism in scientific research, the role of man in any ecosystem and the homosocial tensions of two men together, complicated by a woman. All that is finally revealed is the superficiality of the script.

Tamara, a fashionable bit of fluff masquerading as political drama by John Krizanc, which premiered 20 years ago in Toronto, is held in a stately home. We all gather in the living room and watch scenes as they happen -- at the piano, at the dining-room table, in the bedroom; when one character storms out after a fight with another character, we are free to follow one or stay with the other. The upshot is that nobody knows the whole story (actually I seem to have made all the wrong choices in where to go and what to watch, so I understood next to nothing of the plot and managed to miss every death scene). The acting is melodramatic, the dialogue corny and it feels more like a living board game (think Clue) than theater. I divided my time between watching the action and watching novelist Margaret Atwood, who was in my audience group.

The Mysteries stages the medieval mystery plays, starting with God and Adam and Eve and working up to the Crucifixion, using a huge cast of actors/singers/musicians/ dancers recruited from South Africa -- most of whom had had no professional training. The voices are gorgeous and astonishing -- nobody is miked -- and the dialogue is performed in five languages: English (so heavily accented as to be nearly unintelligible), Afrikaans, Latin, Zulu and Xhosa (the click language). The stagecraft is simple but inventive: A wooden accordion fence is stretched out and a piece of cardboard with "Ark" scrawled on it is hung on the fence for the Noah story, which concludes with a jubilant rendition of "You Are My Sunshine." The instruments are trash cans and plastic water bottles, and women ululate as part of the band. The sociopolitical import of a mixed-race cast and all these languages must have had immense impact on a South African audience, but regardless of venue, the spirit of joy is irresistible, the smiles megawatt and the festival audience was thrilled.

Theater festivals all have different personalities, and World Stage is very Canadian: a pleasant, gracious occasion and an extraordinary opportunity to see major international theater all in one place, at one time.