Jim Burke is well-known to Montreal culture-vultures as the theatre and dance correspondent for the Montreal Gazette, a position he held from 2015 to 2022. He is also a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award-winning playwright, both for his sea-going adaptation of Moby-Dick (it was originally performed on a theatre-ship) and his original play Cornered, both of which were performed in the UK and in Montreal. His play Bestiary, about “three famous animals and their famous last words,” was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2003, and was recently reimagined as an audio piece for classical music by Opéra/théâtre Voxpopuli and Orchestre symphonique de Drummondville, with performances by Sophie Nélisse and Benoît Brière.
Other scripts include Silt (BBC Radio 4), Arise (Rocket Theatre Company, UK), three episodes of the BBC soap Doctors and a young people’s opera based on the comic stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Opéra Voxpopuli, Montreal), which he is currently adapting as a musical, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, with Nick Carpenter of Montreal folk-rock duo Summersett. Jim is also developing his previous adaptation of Dostoyvesky’s Notes From Underground, which was used by director Paul Van Dyck for a workshop at the Shaw Festival, as DevilsNotes. Other works-in-progress include the meta-comedy The Werewolf of Montreal, an anarchic reworking of Guy Endore’s classic novel The Werewolf of Paris, and a free adaptation of Strindberg’s Pariah for That Theatre, Denmark.
As an arts and lifestyle journalist, Jim has written for many publications, both in Montreal and the UK. He has taught Creative Writing in Dawson’s Continuing Education department since 2011, and has taught and held workshops on playwriting, criticism and film theory at many UK institutions, including colleges, universities and arts centres. He has also worked for many years as a dramaturg. Other work includes proofreading, copy editing and writing publicity materials, most recently for the MAI Centre and for the forthcoming Amazon Prime/CBC series, The Sticky.
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