by Judith Thompson
Directed by David Storch
A CanStage Production
at the Berkeley Street Theatre
January 17-February 23, 2008

    Judith Thompson has thrown caution to the winds and gone explicitly political, without falling into many of the traps of political theatre. Her play, that is really a sequence of three monologues by characters with a link to the current Iraq war, shows vividly her gift for dialogue that is engaging as it is inflammatory, cruelly ironic as it is sometimes anguished and tender, coolly rational as it is raw and emotional. It allows each of its three characters an expression of the deepest quivers of being, without necessarily thumping home their points. It neither waffles nor does it collect its points of view into a neat bundle, and though it exercises some of the artifices of dramatic monologues, it feels compellingly credible as a piece of political theatre without ever becoming an illustrated lecture or discursion.

   I have some problems with Teresa Przybylski’s décor of a hard, metallic, rocky landscape because of its badly executed form. I also have some problems with the script itself because it begs our suspension of disbelief by having two ghosts turned back into their real-life selves, and with the writing in the second monologue because it is too coolly arch in its studied reasonableness and tamped down irony. However, these issues hardly interfere with the dramatic impact of the piece as a whole—largely because of Judith Thompson’s ability to transcend her documentary sources and show us caustic wounds and aching humanity, and because of two performances in particular.

   One of these performances happens to come in the opening monologue, where Maev Beaty plays a version of Lynndie England, the young American army reservist who was convicted of sexual, physical and psychological abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners. Dressed in her army fatigues, and already swollen with child out of wedlock, she is a living example of the pornography of war. A Southerner who grew up in poverty and with roaches, unable to hold even a menial job at the Dairy Queen, she is now the subject of notorious vilification on the Internet, and so, yearning to escape to Quebec, where she can, she mistakenly believes, blend right in and bring up her baby as an Eskimo! The comic irony is both wry and savage, for it speaks to a young woman who is totally ignorant of the world and her true role in it. Infested with radical redneck bigotry against liberals, feminists, and anti-war opponents, she spews her venom laced with profanity, all the while espousing her patriotic loyalty to her country. “Vanquishing evil was what I was born to do,” she exclaims, describing in horrid detail all the humiliating, dehumanizing torture she performed of her prisoners, and believing she will be in the history books for having broken down the terrorists and being turned into a political martyr. Unhinged she certainly is; repentant she is not. “I hate the media for making me feel ashamed!” she cries, and it is a cry that would echo in the heart of every neo-con if it were possible to believe that such creatures do have hearts. She is the type of screwed-up villain who prays to her own god, dry ice in her heart. Maev Beaty shows us both her twisted psyche as well as the dry ice.

   Next up is Julian Richings as a British Microbiologist (obviously modeled on David Kelly, the scientist and weapons inspector who blew the whistle on Tony Blair’s lie about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction). Here the writing and acting mark a distinct shift from that in the first monologue. Bleeding from a leg wound, weak from distress, he sits on the ground to tell us a sad story of inconvenient truths about the British government that “sexed up” the war in order to sell it to a largely disbelieving public. Richings speaks in a low voice that often lacks energy or modulation, and his acting, while correctly refusing to seek sympathy, seems flat. Moreover, his text seems too shaped by Judith Thompson’s search for meaning. “This is my first moment of peace since the invasion,” he intones, and Harrowdown Hill is his best hiding place. He sounds nostalgic as he thinks of orange juice, wild honeysuckle, and his daughter’s eyes, and much too self-reflexive as he thinks of himself as a “mousey scientist who set off a storm” while protesting he has no psychiatric history. Of course, the reason for this disclaimer is that Blair’s government was quick to suggest that Kelly’s death was really a suicide—caused by unresolved mental problems—rather than a secret political murder. Trouble is that although the character cries the truth like a man in torment, his voice sounds more like a history backgrounder than the authentic voice of a man bullied by politicians and the media. “I accept what has happened,” he announces, adding: “The only way to defeat them is to disappear.” Hence his death—or suicide—that makes him present but invisible—a talking ghost (in the playwright’s controlling voice) rather than a palpable human being who can sound his own anomalies and distresses without regard to cool reflexive ironies or neatly detonating ones.

   Then comes the final and most poignant monologue by yet another ghost (this one a woman’s), delivered by an actress whose instinct make well be stronger than her technique, yielding a powerful explosion of the character’s heart. Arsinee Khanjian (wife of film director Atom Egoyan, but very much an artist in her own right) plays an Iraqi Mother of four (who is modeled on Nehrjas al-Saffarh, a teacher and communist tortured by Saddam’s secret police in the 1970s and later killed in a bomb explosion). Ms. Khanjian, like any Armenian who knows the trauma of atrocity and genocide, links herself to the very circuit of the character’s raw suffering and torment. Her words, though shot through with humour of cultural bafflement, are rife with pain, as she recalls the murderous politics of Saddam Hussein, as well as the true indifference of Americans to the suffering of the Iraqi people. Her segment gives the play its overall title, for Hussein’s most notorious torture chamber was an old castle called the Palace of Flowers that degenerated into a palace of the end of things for his people. Her tale is excruciating in its uncompromising revelations of horror, as well as of her anguish at the heroic endurance of her tortured and murdered eight-year old son. But it is more than simply an inventory of suffering. It reveals a woman who has lost faith in the sanctions and comforts of religion, yet who can sustain a consoling vision of herself and of her country. Ms. Khanjian makes us see the date palms destroyed by bombs, and manages, without sentimentalizing anything (in what is a small miracle of text and acting), to let us feel that she can, with sheer soul-stirring heroism, put the crowns back on all the trees destroyed by the war.

   David Storch has directed the play with restraint (aided by John Gzowski’s sound design and Kimberly Purtell’s expressionistic lighting), though I am not sure about the device of leaving the first two characters on stage in semi-darkness as Ms. Khanjian delivers her powerhouse monologue. The device is probably meant to denote connections among the three parts, but seems to me to be unnecessary for the monologues establish these connections on their own. Palace of the End is a condensation of the lies about war that we have all come to experience—lies that produce monsters, martyrs, and unwilling victims. 

photos:Chris Gallopic 1: Maev Beaty

pic 2: Julian Richings

pic 3: Arsinee Khanjian


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