A Night of Grief and Mystery is a “provocation” and an “engagement with a dilemma,” says Canadian author/culture activist, Stephen Jenkinson.

Combining stories and observations drawn from Stephen’s extensive experience working in palliative care, with original songs and sounds from recording musician Gregory Hoskins, A  Nights of Grief and Mystery is a theatre experience that transcends genre and language. Over the past eight years, the two artists have toured the show on three continents and have returned to Australia for the first time in over five years.

“My corner of the world is not good with mystery,” explains Stephen. “That is, our education tends to wage war against it and imagine that mystery is some kind of gap in your understanding, some kind of problem to solve, some hole to fill; not as if it were naturally occurring and absolutely a mandatory part of the deal.

“So the Nights of Grief and Mystery is an attempt to reconsider that, but not argumentatively because that tends to be more of the same… You could say it's a ceremony, where you might ordinarily expect a lecture.”

Formerly the leader of a palliative care counselling team at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, Stephen says he came to realise that most people in the Western world are completely unprepared to face their own mortality. He has since set about trying to change the way we die and to help people come to the realisation that death is a fundamental and inevitable part of living.

“As a consequence of working with dying people, It was shocking — I had no idea in the early going — how common a miserable, low-grade, horror-beset, ordinary death actually was in the death trade, but it is exceedingly common,” says Stephen.

“And it goes a long way towards explaining the recourse to antidepressants and sedations of all kinds and now, of course, euthanasia on the one side and the continuing recourse to hallucinogens on the other side.

“All of these, to me, suggest too little too late. Panic attack. When all of these things were imminently and utterly foreseeable….

“I've heard it a million times: Everybody knows they're going to die. Honestly, If that was true I would never have had a job to do, because everything would have been a foregone conclusion. A given. Part of the fabric of the way it is and in no sense of the term, a calamity, or a catastrophe, or even a problem to solve.” 

The Nights of Grief and Mystery is not about giving all the answers, but rather engaging with the question itself, says Stephen.

“You can't fix something, you don't know is there?” says Stephen, “Without an understanding of what's missing, every solution will be another iteration of what's missing. So we don't engage in solutions, we engage in a real-time encounter with the real thing.

“I should say, it's not a death-specific show, and it's called Nights of Grief and Mystery for a reason. It's to celebrate and entertain the real possibility that there's deep education of the spirit available when you engage matters that are mysterious and grief-laden.

“Grief is not the same thing as sadness; grief is an understanding that picks up where sadness finally falls. Love shows up frequently, increasingly in the show… A celebration of the ordinary everydayness of marriage appears and an enormously concerned regard for the near future of young people is there in spades.

“So, it's a prayerfulness, you could say, that picks up where theatre perhaps ends off.” 

See Stephen Jenkinson and Gregory Hoskins A Night of Grief and Mystery 7.30pm at Orange Civic Theatre on Tuesday, October 31. Tickets at Ticketek or call 6393 8111.