Theatre review: Our Ghosts probes a family tragedy six decades in the making
A strained mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of Sally Stubbs’s play
Our Ghosts. Photo by Nico Dicecco
The Firehall Arts Centre presents Our Ghosts, produced by Our Ghosts Collective in association with Western Gold, to April 2
IT WAS ACTUALLY a little eerie being at the Firehall Arts Centre for the premiere of Our Ghosts on March 22, of all dates. This was, after all, the anniversary of the real-life event that inspired the play.
On that day in 1956, playwright Sally Stubbs’s father, an RCAF pilot, took off from Canadian Forces Base Comox in a Lockheed T-33 training jet and never returned.
While Our Ghosts is not strictly autobiographical (the members of the Stubbs family, for example, are represented by the fictional Swansons), it presumably hews fairly close to the truth in its telling of how the loss of a beloved family member shapes the lives of the survivors.
At the script’s centre is the relationship between the author’s stand-in, Kate (Corina Akeson) and her mother, Moira (Barbara Pollard). In the present (2016 in the play, a full 60 years after patriarch Vic’s disappearance), that relationship has been strained by decades of Moira refusing to accept the official account of that fateful day.
Kate has been through it all time and time again, and she is torn between her desire to finally move on and her sense of duty to Moira, who is clearly approaching the end of her life—or at least the part of it where she is still lucid enough to keep pushing for answers.
Stubbs’s smartest decision as a writer is to keep Vic himself largely out of the story. Although we see him (embodied by Sebastien Archibald) in brief flashes of Moira’s dreams and memories, it’s his absence that hangs over everything like the draped parachutes that make up Jessica Oostergo’s spare but effective set.
His turn as Vic may be silent, but Archibald gets plenty to say as the pilot’s look-alike son, Stevie. In fact, his is the play’s standout performance, as a troubled and ultimately doomed young man who never got to meet the father over whom his mother (played in flashbacks by the excellent Lucy McNulty) still obsesses. Stevie projects a goofy stoner persona, but Archibald’s naturalistic approach makes it clear that this is a mask behind which lies a lifetime of generational trauma.
The real tragedy of Our Ghosts is that there actually is no mystery to be solved. Vic is dead, and Moira has spent most of her life clinging to his memory. Writing the play was an act of catharsis for Stubbs; watching it might be tough going for anyone hoping for a happy ending.
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