Drama

This year's review package contains fewer works than last year's and is dominated even more than usual by Playwrights Canada Press publications, thanks to Talon, Scirocco, and Coach House being represented by only two works each. One result of the smaller number of submissions is the markedly fewer newly published plays by women included in the package: five as opposed to last year's ten. There are also fewer collections this year, while at the same time five of the plays submitted for review have previously appeared (and been reviewed) in collections: 'da Kink in my hair, Tightrope Time, Letters in Wartime, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, and The Trials of John Demjanjuk. On the other hand, the package also includes a substantial number of new works by established playwrights, among them John Mighton, who won the 2005 Siminovitch Prize in recognition of his body of work and his influence on emerging theatre artists.

Mighton's sixth play, Half Life, which won the 2005 Governor-General's Literary Award for Drama after winning a Dora for Outstanding New Play, is both an affecting, often comic play about old age set in a nursing home and a complex, profound, metatheatrical meditation on memory, identity, and humanity. The late-life romance between two of the home's residents, Clara, who is eighty, and Patrick, who is eighty-two, raises fundamental questions about memory and identity, as well as the treatment of the elderly. Clara, whose memory loss leads her son, Donald, to describe her as 'not often here,' becomes convinced that Patrick, a new arrival at the home, is the man with whom she had an affair during the Second World War, while her husband was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Although the truth remains tantalizingly unclear, the two octogenarians want to marry, but are prevented by Donald, with particularly harmful results for the code-breaker Patrick. Donald's opposition, which he portrays to Patrick's daughter, Anna, as protective, emerges as a possessive inability to acknowledge his mother's independence. His identity is dependent on his relationship with her: he needs to believe that she remained faithful to his father, because '[t]heir marriage was the most consistent thing in my life' ; 'when she's dead,' he tells the home's chaplain, 'no one will ever think of me the way she did again ... Not even God.' His protectiveness is founded on a lack of respect for his mother, whose mind he characterizes as 'barely functioning,' prompting Anna to retort: 'You talk about her like she's a machine.'

Donald is an expert in 'neural networks ... a kind of computer that simulates the brain'; in a scene in which he tests a computer for its emulation of human behaviour, he observes that 'we'll never be able to simulate human thought until we can simulate forgetting.' Yet he, like the nursing home staff, has trouble acknowledging the full humanity of the elderly residents, with their highly selective memories. As one of them, the cantankerous Agnes, ironically complains when she is coerced into participating in meaningless 'activities': 'I'm sick and tired of these games. I'm a senior citizen and I'd like to be treated like one.' It is left to the comically incompetent Reverend Hill to assert the value of the dying: 'People on the verge of death ... express their essences in very different ways ... Even when the mind fails there's something that shines through. For lack of a better word, I call it the soul.'

Although Half Life is a moving play about memorable characters, it is also an elegantly structured play of ideas, whose themes are embodied in its form. The first scene, an apparently mundane naturalistic encounter between Donald and Anna set in the nursing home's common room, simultaneously introduces the central themes of memory, forgetting, patterns, and communication and, through Donald's self-consciously unfinished story about his father's wartime experiences, the play's chief structural device of short, interrupted scenes that mimic the meandering thought processes of many of the home's residents. The processes of memory that are the...