Rock 'n Rail: «Ghost Trains» and «Spitting Slag»

Ian C. Nelson is librarian emeritus and former assistant director of
libraries at the University of Saskatchewan Library. He is also
dramaturge for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

One of 30 nominees for the 2002 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre and the
winner of the 2002 John V. Hicks Manuscript Award from the Saskatchewan
Writers Guild, Mansel Robinson is riding the crest of a creative and
popular wave like that of Greg Nelson a few years ago. “To the
tradition of Billy Bishop Goes to War, add poetry, politics and
pathos,” says the cover blurb. Indeed, these plays stake an eloquent
claim for Robinson as a latter-day Canadian Clifford Odets. Both plays
have enjoyed exceptionally successful productions on the western Fringe
Festival circuit, with subsequent spinoffs into the regular season of
regional theatres. The pairing of these plays for publication is also
apt because they share poignant father–son themes.

Spitting Slag expresses in monologue punctuated by music the pathos of
a father who survived a mining disaster that took the life of his son.
This is well-traveled territory for many, but Robinson’s “fictional
character talking to a ‘real’ audience … [in] a dialogue” stops
the heart with its immediacy, its cries for revenge, and the personal
reliving of loss. The unjust and inevitable “business as usual”
following the tragedy and the father’s rehabilitation drag the
protagonist into a downward spiral of ache and addiction that
nevertheless ends around a kitchen table where “here we are. Telling
stories … I think they are love stories.”

If Spitting Slag is about grieving, then Ghost Trains states flat out
that “there’s a lot of work to dying.” Punctuated this time by
songs with music composed by Stewart MacDougall (song notations are
included), here we have a son accompanying the slow death of his father,
watching “his tail-end lights roll into Dark Territory,” trying to
ease the journey with true stories and bullshit, songs and reminiscences
about the railway. No less gritty than its companion piece, Ghost Trains
evokes the romantic pull of riding the rails with the recklessness of an
outlaw and the free yet desperate survival instincts of a hobo.

These two dramatic monologues glow with truth, feeling, and virile
poetry.