Summoned by letter by a long-lost aunt, Kemp has rushed by train umpteen miles across Canada to be at her bedside as she is dying. Except that the old lady doesn’t die, at least not for quite a long time. Despite sundry attempts to encourage her to do so, she just won’t. Exasperating.

Morris Panych is currently Canada’s most esteemed playwright, and this is a prodigiously clever black comedy, with moments of farce. Crisply and sensitively directed by Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, this production does it justice. Every moment has its absorbing interest.

Kemp, a middle-aged, bumbling loner, played here by Simon Ferry, does most of the talking and stage business, with Grace mainly sitting up in bed watching him, or getting on with her knitting. He is not particularly bright, or adept, or tactful, or, having been the friendless only child of dysfunctional parents, good at relating to others. So, whatever relating does develop has to come the hard way. Ferry does very well in bringing out all the downsides of this character, and yet also his humanity, which, finally, one can respect.

The role of Grace, played by Shirley Kelly, appears relatively simple, given that she stays silent and relatively passive for so much of the time; and yet it carries a subtext that will only come to light near the end. It’s a subtler, more demanding role than it had seemed to
be; and Kelly is fully into it.

The single set, Grace’s bedroom, designed by Harvey Taylor and Shelley Irwin, ingeniously conveys an ambience of run-down attractiveness, an exaggerated sense of depth, a sense of the world outside the window, suggestions of other parts of the house beyond the doors. It’s slightly out of kilter …

The play confronts us now and then with the sadnesses of life – loneliness, loss through death, misery – and yet there’s also plenty of humour, some of it black. It’s a fine work.
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Kemp is summoned to the deathbed of his aunt. He arrives, he vigils, she dies. Even such is life.

It’s not one of the great vigils. Aunt Grace is not so much on her deathbed as in it – where she remains for two years – and Kemp’s not the most gracious of invigilators; he throws tanties, he wallows maudlinly in his own past, he attempts her murder. She lives out her allotted span, materially assisted by his inept attempts to abridge it.

Around this exposition of hopeless ineptitude on every level of the human condition is wrapped one of the great existential plays.

The gloriously written and gloriously enacted character called Kemp suffers from an inability to attract the faintest flicker of attention from Fate. To his aunt he wails: "All those years I thought you had forgotten me – and you actually had."

He wears his mother’s clothing – bras presumably on the outside – and no one notices. In pre-transvestite youth he had been "addicted to annoying my mother". His ultimate act of attention-seeking led to the deepest hubris; he hid from her for an entire day: "She was frantic." He emerges – to find she’d been hyper-ventilating all day over the ostensible loss of the family cat.

Kemp is the guy who put the `non’ into `life’ and so damaged is the poor schmuck, that his reading matter throughout the vigil is How To Grieve.

Saddest of all, as he sits at the foot of the deathbed, watching the seasons go by through the unsquare window, is the fact that – never mind Fate, his mother or his aunt – he can’t even catch the eye of Death.

So he takes the matter in hand ("I’m concerned about your health; it seems to be improving") – poisons, pillows, a Heath Robinson death machine, strangulation – a gut-busting sequence of Wile E Coyote assassination backfirings ensue. To semi-transcribe a famous phrase, someone Off cried: "Death, where is thy prick" – and on walked Kemp. 

Plays which tweak the tail of the devil are not new, but the subversion of tragedy in Vigil certainly is. [Spoiler Warning]
Kemp falls asleep in a chair, Aunt Grace for the first time dinks out of bed and lovingly covers his shoulders with a sheet. Then pulls it over his head as a shroud, hee hee.    
Kemp climbs into the wardrobe thus becoming the first gay to get back into the closet.
And the polo-necked jersey Aunt Grace is knitting throughout and which moves in status from object of displacement behaviour to ultimate gift of love is posthumously found to be miles too small. [Warning ends]

Vigil is delivered in rapid-fire pitter-patter – odd in a play in which one character makes 99 percent of the conversation. But that’s the Yin and Yang of isolation I suppose; Kemp’s had no one to talk to for thirty years, and his aunt’s had no one to listen to. The compatibility of alienation.

And by director Lyndee-Jane Rutherford this theme is teased into a lovely study – by a Canadian writer whose list of accolades is longer than the play – of two unwanted people who gradually bond to share their loneliness; thereby doubling its size and depth.

Simon Ferry avers this is his last play and that he will now go back to the farm and build sheds. He should be locked into that deathbed and have the Prefaces of GB Shaw read to him until he relents.

With his empty suitcase – the accumulations of a life spent… um, yeah, spent – and his John Smythe haircut, Ferry brings us a Kemp who is everything that Willie Loman would have been if he’d failed as a salesman. Who else could mistake the Personal Column cri de couer "old and dying" for "yodelling"? You don’t retire when you can do Kemp like this, you retire when you are Kemp.

Ask Shirley Kelly, 132 next birthday and with contracts running up to 2047 she’s certainly no quitter. She isn’t mute throughout, she is beautifully playing all the pauses and silences. Take her take on Kemp climbing into the wardrobe and soliloquising therefrom. Her total lack of surprise at his antics, her indifference to the geography of his lament shatteringly reinforced his nothingness. Superb.

The set, by Shelley Irwin and Harvey Taylor is just off-kilter enough to create faintly uneasy nausea (a nod, I am sure, to the famous existential work of Jean Paul Sartre) and the scenes are cut by darkness into one-thought segments – we are walking slowly round the walls of a prison cage in Bedlam, the darkness the prison bars.  
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