Related Information for
PALACE OF THE END
ARTICLE ON AND INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT JUDITH THOMPSON.
The following is a reprint of an article that
appeared on Canada's CBC.ca by Martin Marrow (CBC News Correspondent) on
January 16th, 2008, the day before PALACE OF THE END made its Canadian
debut at the Berkeley Theatre of Toronto's Canadian Stage Company.
From Hell
Judith Thompson's new play finds scapegoats and heroes in Iraq
A British weapons inspector (Julian Richings, left), a
U.S. soldier (Maev Beaty) and an Iraqi mother (Arsinée Khanjian, right)
provide differing perspectives on the war in Iraq in Judith Thompson's
latest play, Palace of the End. (Chris Gallow/Canadian Stage)
"It's unbearable," says Judith Thompson candidly.
"Unbearable." The 53-year-old playwright and mother
of five shudders as she reflects on a monologue from her latest play, Palace
of the End. In the monologue, Nehrjas Al Saffarh, an Iraqi
political activist played by film actress Arsinee Khanjian, describes how she
and her children were brutally tortured during Saddam Hussein's regime.
"That's probably why I've stayed away from rehearsal,"
says Thompson, whose play opens Jan. 17 at Toronto's Canadian Stage. "You
can only listen to that once. I feel for Arsinee, having to say it over
and over."
It looks like the Dark Lady of the Canadian Theatre has finally found a
subject even she can't stomach. For Palace of the End,
Thompson, the author of such nightmarish plays as The Crackwalker,
White Biting Dog and Lion in the Streets, has
descended smack dab into the hell of Iraq.
Taking its ominous title from the former royal palace that housed Saddam
Hussein's torture chamber, Thompson's docudrama uses a triad of monologues to
tell three real-life tales of Iraq before and after the U.S.-led
invasion. The speakers, in order of appearance, are Lynndie England, the
U.S. Army reservist court-martialled for her abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib
prison; Dr. David Kelly, the late British weapons inspector who exposed his
country's "sexed up" justifications for the invasion; and
Saffarh, a member of Iraq's communist party, who survived Saddam's secret
police only to die during U.S. bombing in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Palace, which co-stars Julian Richings as Kelly and Maev
Beaty as England, is the first overtly political play in Thompson's
three-decade career. Tough as it was to write, she makes no apologies
for it. But she admits she was initially hesitant to weigh in on a
conflict Canada chose to stay out of.
"I'm a news hound. I was obsessed by Iraq," she says
over her morning coffee in the Canadian Stage boardroom. "But I
thought, Who would I be to write about it? How do I dare? But
finally I trusted myself as a writer and made a leap."
Playwright Judith Thompson. (David Laurence/Canadian Stage)
It took Volcano, a little Toronto theatre company, to give her the
push. In 2004, Volcano's artistic director, Ross Manson, asked Thompson
to write a 10-minute piece for a new political-theatre cabaret. As it
happened, she'd just read about England, the petite West Virginia soldier
notorious for her swaggering, thumbs-up poses alongside naked prisoners in the
disturbing Abu Ghraib photos. "I'd never even thought of doing [a play
about] a real person before," Thompson says, "but I was so
fascinated by her, who she was and what happened to her."
Thompson's monologue, My Pyramids -- a reference to
England's penchant for having prisoners form human pyramids -- premiered that
winter at the inaugural Wrecking Ball
cabaret. The following summer, Volcano toured an expanded version to
the Edinburgh Fringe, where it garnered some great reviews. That
encouraged Thompson to widen her focus, adding the Kelly and Nehrjas
sections. Together, the three pieces give a personal perspective to the
outrages of a misbegotten war, and the horrors it was ostensibly meant to
alleviate.
The play presents a trio of victims' voices -- if you accept Thompson's
view that England was merely the scapegoat for a scandal that revealed the
sordid underside of a supposed war of liberation. "It might not be
immediately apparent, but I'm on her side," Thompson says. "She
has been strung up in the public square as a monster, but that monster was
created by American society."
It's no surprise that she was drawn to England, a marginalized figure who
could have stepped out of one of Thompson's earlier plays. In My
Pyramids, England is portrayed as an under-educated, white trash
tomboy pregnant with her soldier-boyfriend's baby; England claims she
participated in the Abu Ghraib abuses to impress him and her other male
comrades. More upset at being called ugly than being vilified for her
acts, England shrugs off her behaviour as no different from the bullying she
witnessed as a kid.
Researching England on the internet, Thompson says she came upon "a
raft of the most vile, misogynist, sexually sadistic responses I've ever
seen. People think I'm a playwright of the dark, but I could never make
any of this stuff up. So I thought, I've got to go there, I've got to
deal with what happens when a woman who is considered to be homely becomes
high profile, what that represents, and why that triggers such incredible
rage."
Dr. Kelly, it will be remembered, was also a target of rage. The
veteran arms inspector was pilloried by the British government for telling the
BBC that evidence of Iraq's weapons capability had been exaggerated to make a
case for going to war. After being harangued and belittled during a
government inquiry, Kelly went into the woods near his Oxfordshire home and
apparently committed suicide.
"They kept referring to him as a mouse of a man and a Walter Mitty,"
says Thompson in disgust. "Walter Mitty? [Kelly] was in Iraq 37
times -- he knew what was there." Kelly's monologue, Harrowdown
Hill, takes place in the hours before his death, when the gentle
scientist contemplates the conspiracy theories that will follow his demise and
reveals the tragic circumstances that finally forced him to expose the false
premises for the war.
Arsinee Khanjian plays an Iraqi political activist tortured during Saddam
Hussein's regime. (Chris Gallow/Canadian Stage)
The play's most painful testimony, however, comes from Khanjian's
character, Nehrjas. A woman of astonishing courage, Nehrjas calmly sips
tea in her Baghdad home as she recounts how she and her sons underwent
excruciating tortures in order to protect the whereabouts of her husband, the
communist party leader. Her monologue is called Instruments of
Yearning -- the bizarre euphemism for Saddam's secret police.
Thompson says she learned about the Saffarh family's ordeal from her
Toronto neighbours, Dr. Thabit A.J. Abdullah, an Iraqi history professor at
York University, and his wife, Samara. Nehrjas' monologue is based on a
written account of her experiences, which Samara Abdullah translated from
Arabic for Thompson.
"The reason I wanted to include it is because I think we've got to
look at the whole truth," Thompson says. "I'm very much
against the occupation, but we can't pretend that everything in Iraq was
OK. Saddam truly was a monster."
Thompson is thrilled to have Khanjian playing the role of Nehrjas.
The actress, known for her performances in husband Atom Egoyan's films
(including The Sweet Hereafter and Ararat) was
suggested by one of the playwright's friends. "I thought she'd
be perfect," says Thompson, whose own film credits include the
screenplay for cult fave Lost and Delirious. "She
has the same energy as Nehrjas, that same charismatic intensity."
This production, directed by new Canadian Stage artistic director David
Storch, is the play's Canadian premiere. It had its first staging last summer
at Los Angeles' NoHo Arts Center and a reading prior to that in Florence,
Italy. A New York production by the off-Broadway Epic Theatre Ensemble, which
commissioned the work, is scheduled for June.
Thompson hopes her first foray into political theatre will do some
good. She's giving her royalties from the published version of Palace
of the End to the Iraqi Alamal Association, a charity suggested by
Dr. Abdullah, and encouraging audience members to also donate. According
to the SourceWatch web site, the association was founded in 1992 and is
dedicated to "medical, social, cultural and educational reconstruction
projects that improve the socioeconomic conditions of the Iraqi people."
"Two hundred people are dying every day in Iraq. [Canadians]
have to do something about it, in terms of aid or accepting more
refugees," Thompson says. "Here we are as privileged
Westerners, living on the tip of this iceberg that's in an ocean of
blood. We can see the iceberg and the blood, but we're just dancing on
the tip."
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