Vigil is a story told by your favourite grandparent from a rocking chair on a winter's afternoon. It's delightfully rich and small-scale — a friendless misanthrope travels across the country to visit his ailing aunt in what are supposed to be her final days. It's quaint, warm and familiar — they fall into friendship almost by accident, and we're left with the message that everyone needs someone. It even has the pitch black sense of humour adopted by those who have seen every part of the world they care to — “Why are you putting on makeup? Why don't you let the mortician do that?”
Unfortunately, Vigil shortsells itself by adopting the same rambling narrative style of your senile granddad as well. In the first act, Kemp (the nephew, played by Dean Paul Gibson) begins as a charming but hollow caricature of the “insensitive young person” who transforms every scene into a giant zing on his Aunt Grace (played by the legendary Joyce Doolittle). It's funny, sure, but after the sixth scene that can be stripped down into “dialogue, dialogue, dialogue — hah! You're old!” it's easy to wonder if all the witticism is actually going to go anywhere.
Fortunately, it does. After intermission, the play transforms completely. Kemp becomes three-dimensional and Grace — almost entirely silent throughout — begins to develop a kind of taciturn sweetness. Excruciating emotional gut shots are woven in with the punchy dialogue with such effortless precision that when the twist comes — and it's a good one — you laugh more from the exhaustion than the payoff. The last half of the play is the extra cup of cocoa you get for listening to grandpa talk.
Both Gibson and Doolittle are excellent, but that's little surprise considering their combined CV could fill the Library of Alexandria. More remarkable is the outstanding production design. Every set piece is askew, dirty newspaper slathers the windows and piles of what can only be described as “neat old junk” populate the upstage area. Lighting and sound are of similarly high quality — completely unobtrusive but impressive to those who make a hobby (or profession) out of obsessing over minute details. Once again, Theatre Calgary lives up to its staggeringly high production standards, and justifies its equally high ticket price.
Not-so-ironically, Vigil is the kind of play you want to take your grandparents to. A cute story about old age, loneliness, love, loss, hope and despair, it hits all the same notes as those fireside parables you might remember from your childhood. As a pithy log line: it's affecting and memorable, and you miss it terribly once its gone.
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