Spycraft is a two-act play supported by the Toronto Arts Council about the female operatives who spied on the Germans in WWII occupied France by knitting code into ordinary garments.

Cleo gives a speech at a Canadian ceremony celebrating female WWII spies—the information’s just been declassified. She didn’t know her grandmother was a spy; she thought Audette was a sweet old lady who knitted socks. But Audette kept a memoir which answered some questions and left many more. Cleo’s present dovetails with Audette’s past as a middle-aged woman and hidden Jew who joins the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) as a spy in occupied France. Her male colleague is skeptical she’ll make a difference because she’s a woman and an ‘old’ one at that–but she challenges the chauvinism and Antisemitism of the day by using her invisibility to employ a classically female craft to pass coded intelligence about the Germans to the Allies: knitting. After sharing the secret story of Audette’s brazen Nazi take-down, Cleo grapples with the sudden discovery she’s Jewish, especially when Antisemitism is on the rise, and spreading disinformation about the Holocaust has become commonplace. Will Cleo hide her identity as Audette did? Or will she embrace it, and all that it means?