DETAILS

Palace of the End by Downstage Theatre
Vertigo Theatre
Thursday, February 19 - Saturday, February 28

More in: Theatre

Downstage’s first show of 2009, Palace of the End, is a powerful production consisting of three fictional monologues on the war in Iraq. Playwright Judith Thompson paints vivid and shocking images that jab the audience like a bayonet.

Simon Mallett, Sharon Pollock and Kelly Reay each direct one monologue of roughly half an hour, with one flowing directly after another. Only the most skilled of writers can get away with constructing a play in which there is no interaction between characters and no real plot — only long stretches of uninterrupted talk. Thompson, who has won the Governor General’s Award for drama twice, pulls it off magnificently.

Thompson is known for writing works that expose and confront the ugliness within people and society, and Palace of the End continues that tradition but with more of a political edge. Does this play have an agenda? Yes. But Thompson writes it in such a way that it doesn’t come across as preachy or self-righteous.

The play opens with Lynndie England (Lesley Galbecka), the American soldier introduced to the world in 2004 when pictures of her surfaced, smiling and posing alongside naked Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. Galbecka gives a nuanced, engaging and somewhat sympathetic portrayal of England. She alternates between justifying the inhumanity of her actions and feeling haunted by them. This is the most fascinating of the three monologues in the show. Thompson gives this figure of international contempt a voice, and even though England comes across as both pitiful and ignorant, Thompson manages to insert questions about the circumstances and attitudes that might have led England to commit some of the atrocities.

England is most concerned that the public thinks she is ugly and is upset by the comments posted about her on the Internet. One person, for example, writes that she is so ugly he would rather cut off her head and “fuck her neckhole.” It’s these sorts of shocking images that make this play visually outstanding.

The second monologue is from Dr. David Kelly (Stephen Hair), the Welsh-born United Nations weapons inspector who committed suicide in 2003 after revealing to a journalist that reports of Iraq’s capability to produce weapons of mass destruction were exaggerated. Hair gives a sympathetic portrayal of Kelly as he lies dying, rambling on about his daughter, his dead Iraqi friends and his decision to reveal the truth about the weapons, all in a soft-spoken, fatherly way.

The final monologue is from the perspective of an Iraqi woman (Ntara Curry), whose husband was a leader in Iraq’s communist party. She tells the audience how members of Saddam Hussein’s regime tortured her and her children to get information on her husband’s hiding place.

This should have been the most compelling of the monologues. It deals with a mother’s grief over the death of a child, and Thompson paints horrific images of a child being left to spin from a ceiling fan. However, I found this section of the production slightly disappointing. It lacks energy compared to the other two monologues, and Curry’s grief appears forced. Both Galbecka and Hair use dialects to help locate their characters in the broad, international picture that is the war in Iraq, but Curry does not, and it takes away from the authenticity of her portrayal.