I don’t know how
to begin talking about this production, so I’m just going to start somewhere
and hope it all makes sense. I believe there are two constants in life – birth
and death. They aren’t necessarily always in that order, and there mightn’t be
all that much time between them, but on average, there is about seventy-odd
years between the two events, seventy-odd years to grow and love and feel and
hurt and laugh and cry and reach out to other people and try and make it the
best you can. What Campion Decent achieves in his Unholy
Ghosts is something like a reflection or a meditation upon a life-lived,
a grand statement upon the resolution of two lives well-lived to the fullest,
to see what lies beneath and what we can glean from surviving the passing of
our parents.
Presented by White Box Theatre and Griffin Independent, Unholy Ghosts is mostly told through
scenes featuring the son and one of either parent, and direct-audience address.
It is a namless family – the characters are known and referred to as simply
Mother, Father, Son, and Daughter (though she does not make an appearance in
the story.) Obviously autobiographical to a degree, we’re not quite sure of
what’s real and what isn’t; perhaps ‘creative autobiography’ is a useful term
here, seeing as – in Decent’s own words – it was “written from a space of grief
in an attempt to honour yet complicate the past.”
