Written by Morris Panych. Directed by Glynis Leyshon. A Playhouse Theatre Company production. At the Vancouver Playhouse until February 3

Vigil is billed as a dark comedy, but in its current incarnation it’s all about light. It’s supposedly a meditation on death, but its central character ends up choosing life, by growing a heart. Its bitter and cynical text has a sentimental core; its morbid streak is leavened by vaudeville timing.

In short, it’s a plain case of role reversal—and nowhere is that more apparent than in the part of Kemp, written by Vancouver playwright Morris Panych and now, for the first time since Vigil debuted in 1995, played by him as well.

Lonely, narcissistic, unloved, and unloving, Kemp is a middle-aged bank teller whose chief joy in life is making his customers wait. He sees himself as a Medusa of the wicket, capable of turning lesser mortals to stone, but is in fact a nervous, shallow, and borderline-suicidal head case, whose spiffy appearance is belied by his empty suitcase and flat-lined savings account. When he’s summoned to the bedside of his aged and ailing aunt Grace, he sees this as his golden opportunity: she might possess only a cobwebbed apartment and a suite of rickety furniture, but to him that’s a fortune.

The aunt refuses to die, and Kemp takes increasingly desperate measures to speed her passing: he attempts to poison her, strangle her, suffocate her with a pillow, and electrocute her with a Rube Goldberg contraption of his own devising. All these plots backfire or otherwise fail, of course; rather than create a sense of mounting horror, Panych the playwright drives deeper into the absurd, and Panych the actor quite successfully solicits the audience’s sympathy. By the end of the show, we rather love the little nebbish.

There’s a twist, of course, but we won’t reveal it here—even if both script and actors telegraph it well in advance. There are other structural problems: Grace is mute for an eternity, speaking at last only to wish Kemp a merry Christmas. Then she clams up again. Why? Knowing she can speak if she wants to dampens the comic effect of Kemp’s monologues.

Jennifer Phipps plays Grace, and she is more than adequate in a role that does not give her much to do. Panych, meanwhile, revels in his part. Kemp is a creature of misanthropy compounded with self-loathing, and the actor-playwright falls into his creation the way dogs roll in otter droppings: with ecstatic, malodorous enthusiasm.

Regardless of the script’s sentimentality, Panych gives a nicely nuanced performance. Kemp might aspire to being droll, if not witty, but his creator goes well beyond that. Ken MacDonald’s set, all rusty windows and canted walls, is simple and effective, as is Alan Brodie’s lighting design; Alessandro Juliani and Meg Rose underscore the action with well-made and unobtrusive music.

In the realm of plays that deal with Big Issues, Vigil is relatively lightweight fare—but any opportunity to laugh in the face of death is one worth taking.