By Charles Demers and Marcus Youssef. Directed by Marcus Youssef. A Neworld Theatre production. A Cultch and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presentation. At the York Theatre on Tuesday, January 26. Continues until January 30

Off the top of his solo show, Charles Demers declares that his intention with Leftovers is to bring together two constituencies that barely made it out of the 20th century breathing: live theatre and the political left. And he promises that the evening is going to be kind of like a TED Talk, but “longer for sure. And way less hopeful.”

Demers’s subject is the way that neoliberalism—the free-market politics of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Stephen Harper—has overwhelmed the more compassionate instincts of socialism. And he frames his analysis in a mashup of styles that combines standup comedy with personal revelations.

Demers starts with his birth. Between the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, he was born on Canada Day in 1980, the son of a Québécois father and an Anglo-Canadian mother. It’s an iconic Canadian story, he says, “except we didn’t steal the delivery room from a Native family that was already using it.” As Demers works his way to the present, he keeps his guns blazing. Describing our recent Conservative prime minister, the playwright captures Harper’s personal warmth by saying that he seems to have been “birthed from an egg in some sort of irradiated crocodile nest”.

At the heart of the show and its political analysis rests Demers’s relationship with his mother, Robin. Margaret Thatcher famously declared that there is no such thing as society, and Demers gives that argument its due. Then he reveals that his mom was diagnosed with leukemia when he was five, and he says that, when you have a sick parent, you find out how helpless your family is to protect you from certain things. For survival, you must depend on the society that Thatcher didn’t believe in, but which she, like Harper, set out to dismantle nonetheless. And that’s how a kid who grew up in the greedy ’80s came to understand socialism.

The script and Parjad Sharifi’s design both give these ideas poetic expression. Sharifi’s set consists of three large geometric projection surfaces: a circle and two rectangles. These shapes and the angular lighting effects with which the designer embellishes them wittily reference the Soviet constructivist school of art. Sharifi also pours text and photographs over all sorts of surfaces. And, without giving too much away, let me say that some of those photographs neatly tie together the themes of politics and mother/child relations.

Nonetheless, Leftovers stays stylistically marooned, just outside the realm of deeply satisfying theatricality. In its drawn-out conclusion, Leftovers descends to the level of a lecture and, throughout, the tone is more declarative than evocative, stuck in a combination of diatribe and standup. As my interest waned, I realized that I was longing for more narrative and for a storytelling style more deeply embedded in the physicality of theatre.

Still, as it stands—and delivers—Leftovers is an impressive achievement. Its politics are progressive and its realization is skilled in many ways. Viva la revolución!