Seven Oaks Magazine.

The more honest amongst us would probably be willing to admit that our reaction to death is fairly solipsistic; it’s an easier confession to make in more secular times and environments, when we aren’t concerned about our loved ones facing purgatory, Hell, or any sort of judgment or general accountancy in the hereafter. We the surviving, on the other hand, are left to deal with the guilt, grief, funeral planning, will executing, squabbling and tear-soaked shirtsleeves, and therefore we consider ourselves to be death’s true victims.

We wouldn’t generally admit to considering ourselves to be the victims of dying, though, and so there tends to be a certain reverence afforded to those at death’s door before they cross the threshold; those who are facing the imminent prospect of erasure, of mortality, in so much more pressing a way than the rest of us do. And so we’d be horrified to find ourselves thinking of how another person’s disintegration inconveniences us, or how their wasting away too slowly might prove a bother. We certainly wouldn’t admit to identifying with someone like Kemp, the protagonist of Vancouver playwright Morris Panych’s Vigil, who excuses his late arrival to his Aunt Grace’s deathbed by explaining that he simply skimmed the letter she’d sent for help in her last days, that “‘Old and dying’ looks a lot like ‘yodeling’ when you run them together like that”; who demands of that same bed-ridden old relative “Why are you putting on make-up? Why don’t you let the mortician do that?”

Vigil is mostly a collection of just such short, blackly wisecracking exchanges (‘exchanges’ being not precisely the right word, as Kemp’s aunt – played by Jennifer Phipps – is mostly silent; though Phipps's facial expressions say more that most actor’s do when delivering soliloquies). Panych himself plays the asexual-bisexual, cross-dressing and egocentric Kemp, and it’s fitting for the writer himself to take on the role, as this is most definitely auteur comedy; Vigil plays a little like early, more slapstick Woody Allen – some of this stuff is very broad and built around punchlines, some of it is extremely morbid and very, very clever.

Kemp arrives expecting Grace to disintegrate fairly quickly and unobtrusively (he brings only one suit, which he also expects to wear to the service). But the news of Grace’s death has been highly exaggerated, mostly by Kemp, who talks about little else besides it and his traumatic childhood, and the selfish nephew grows more honest about his desire that she wrap things (life) up. When he builds her a suicide machine, we get the point – Kemp wants to get on with his life, despite the fact that he doesn’t have much of one at all.

In his feigned mourning and not-so-gentle prodding towards the abyss, Kemp is not too unlike the “friends” of live theatre who insist that the medium is dead in favour of film, television and internet (the same can be said for the generally morbid partisans of book-reading, which makes it all the more appropriate that Vigil is directed by Glynis Leyshon, Artistic Director for the Playhouse but also host of the Knowledge Network’s By the Book). Just like Kemp won’t let Grace live her life for all his bemoaning her ineluctable death, book-readers and theatre-goers spend too much time talking about how their favourite media are goners, and not enough time loving good literature and experiencing sublime plays.

But Vigil isn’t just an allegory; it’s also a fun, dark, Sisyphian comedy about self-obsession, our growing inability to empathize, and the possibilities for redemption. Yeah, funny stuff.