Judith Thompson’s Ghosts

Abstract

Death wears many guises in Judith Thompson’s plays. In The Crackwalker (1980), one character tells another, “[B]ein dead ain’t no different from livin [...]. It’s just like movin to Brockville or Oshawa or something. It ain’t that different.” The second character disagrees, “I know it’s different” (45), but by the end of the play, the characters have reversed their positions: the second kills his own infant son and fails even to register the death, merely saying, “It’s okay it’s not crying anymore” (65), while the first remarks, “I think it’s better off dead” (70), thus implying that being dead must be different. Life and death form a complex dialectic in this play and throughout Thompson’s writing. Being dead may or may not be different from living – and it also may or may not be worse. In her early plays, mysterious forces such as a talking dog, an “animal” behind a wall, and even the darkness of an epileptic seizure, compel the characters to act; because they occur off-stage, they may be real or imagined. In Thompson’s more recent plays, these forces are personified, taking on physical presence witnessed by characters and audience alike. These forces are corporeal ghosts who look and act just like human beings, only better. Unlike the early shadows, these corporeal ghosts lack ambiguity and are often well-intentioned. Thompson’s dead characters try to improve the lives of the living – not only the living characters within the plays, but also the live audiences who observe them. For instance, Isobel, the dead girl who haunts Lion in the Streets (1992), concludes the play by addressing the audience: “I want you to have your life” (63). By breaking the fourth wall with this imperative appeal, Thompson transforms the dialectic between life and death into a dialectic between life and theatre. By creating characters who are ghosts, Thompson aligns herself with tradition while posing the same questions as contemporary feminist theory. “Theatre ... has had a long romance with ghosts,” writes Peggy Phelan, who names the ghost of Hamlet’s father as the birth of Western theatre’s “sustained conversation with the incorporeal” (Mourning 2). Thompson recognizes her own plays as part of this tradition, recalling classical tropes while subverting them. Hamlet fears that his father’s ghost may be an agent of the devil and therefore he flounders in doubt. The characters in Thompson’s Perfect Pie voice the same apprehension: “And I believe in God again,” says one, while the other remarks, “Oh to me that’s just the devil playin’ with you” (18). In spite of Thompson’s humorous touch (her characters are talking about the stomach flu), such concerns are the serious subject matter of her plays; she poses them as essential dialectics: god and the devil, self and other, life and death, and she creates corporeal ghosts to embody such contradictions. Elizabeth Grosz defines the human body in terms of binary pairs that destabilize it: “The body is neither – while also being both – the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctive or learned ...” (23). With her creation of ghosts, Thompson comments on the meaning of the body, aligning herself with Grosz and other feminist theorists: the body is a mass of contradictions, necessarily physical yet fundamentally abstract, the key element and also the essential challenge of theatre and performance.