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    Lion In The Streets
    Lion In The Streets
    Lion In The Streets
    Ebook232 pages1 hour

    Lion In The Streets

    By Judith Thompson

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    About this ebook

    Seventeen years ago, Isobel was murdered at the tender age of nine. Now she finds herself back in her previous life as a ghost searching for the person responsible for her untimely death. But this time she’s powerful, having the ability to watch over the living, observe them, and sometimes interact with them. Isobel has been paying attention to her former neighbours, and it’s not long before she begins to suffer along with them during their dark and horrific private experiences. Will she finally get the peace she’s been yearning for? One of Judith Thompson’s most enduring plays, Lion in the Streets looks at the inner emotional turmoil in ordinary people and the ways in which they cope.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateMay 13, 2015
    ISBN9781770912762
    Lion In The Streets
    Author

    Judith Thompson

    Judith Thompson is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for White Biting Dog and The Other Side of the Dark. In 2006 she was invested as an Officer in the Order of Canada and in 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play Palace of the End. Judith is a professor of drama at the University of Guelph and lives with her husband and five children in Toronto.

    Read more from Judith Thompson

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      Book preview

      Lion In The Streets - Judith Thompson

      The Fractured Subject of Judith Thompson

      During the extended six-week workshop in the spring of l990 that transformed Judith Thompson's radio play A Big White Light into the first stage version of Lion in the Streets at the du Maurier World Stage Theatre Festival in June l990, Judith Thompson the director would occasionally ask the stage manager, Nancy Dryden, to break the company and dim the light in the small back space at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre where the workshop was being held. While actors and others drank coffee and ran lines in the lobby, Judith Thompson the writer walked about alone in the darkened room, getting into the blood, as she says, of her characters. By the time the break was over she would present, with astonishing rapidity, new, remarkable, and quite unexpected passages of text, often replacing brilliant lines or even whole scenes that, however effective in themselves, were deemed to be expendable. Great lines, she says, are a dime a dozen.

      Quite apart from her alacrity in cutting, Judith Thompson's process as a writer is consistent with her background as a graduate in English from Queen's University and from the acting program of the National Theatre School, and congruent with Tarragon Theatre's reputation as the home of poetic naturalism. Her own training as an actor no doubt reinforced Thompson's well-developed sense of characterization and her acute ear for dialogue, and Tarragon Theatre proved for almost two decades a congenial host for Thompson's writer-in-residency and a valued first producer for all of her plays from 1984 until 2006.

      But if poetic naturalism, however evocative, were all she wrote, Judith Thompson would not have the reputation she does as the creator of disturbing and dislocating theatrical experiences. Lion in the Streets, like all her plays, betrays an abiding interest in psychological motivation, and evokes immediate empathy for characters who are conceived in depth. Unlike those in more conventionally naturalistic plays, however, the characters in Lion in the Streets tend to be fragmented and discontinuous, and they are rarely contained within a single, unified action or linear plot. They tend, too, to be represented self-consciously as constructs undergoing crises of subjectivity, struggling to bridge a persistent gulf between the self that speaks and the self represented in that discourse as the subject, the I. As the characters struggle to construct a unified self through a narrative that will allow them to understand—or comprehend—their lives, the play's plot becomes the site of duelling, contradictory, and even mutually exclusive narratives—multiple actions that are disturbingly open and exploratory rather than comfortably closed. This seems to be the case on the level of character and individual scene, in which the often violent or disjunctive actions are matched by a radical uncertainty about what is really happening, about whose point of view is true, and under what circumstances. But it is also the case that the overall relay structure of the play resists closure, containment, and easy comprehension, as a character from each scene is carried forward to the next, catalyst to a new action. As Thompson said, during a panel discussion at the du Maurier World Stage, I just couldn't cope with the idea of a huge body of narrative. . . I started to find that kind of narrative tedious, because your expectations are usually fulfilled. Replacing the unity of traditional linear narrative are the overarching but problematic presence of Isobel, the play's collage-like composite portrait of an urban neighbourhood in crisis and, in production, a multiplicity of associative visual and musical linking devices such as the act-ending dances and the evocative disk that featured above centre-stage in the original du Maurier World Stage and Tarragon productions.

      Naturalistic drama traditionally relies on the creation of fully empathetic characters whose psychological crises—constructed by the plays as personal neuroses—precipitate conflicts in the action. These conflicts are resolved through a reversal in the play's central and linear plot, producing in the central character(s) a recognition of an already existing, well-adjusted, and unified self whose problems have been explained as deviations from a hegemonic social norm. The empathy created between character and audience in such plays in turn produces a cathartic release of potentially disruptive emotions in an audience that leaves the theatre satisfied—calm of mind, all passion spent. Such plays, then, serve to contain potential social and psychological unrest, to explain disturbances and dissatisfactions in terms of individual psychology, and by purging discontent to affirm the social and political status quo.

      In the plays of Judith Thompson, and most clearly in Lion in the Streets, intense empathy with naturalistically conceived character functions quite differently: in spite of a presentation of character that is psychologically acute, nothing is explained away. As she remarked at the du Maurier World Stage panel session, I don't want to write industrial plays that play to psychology classes. Thompson's characters experience a conflict between a self that is submissive to the inherited and hegemonic discursive practices of society and a self that is not synonymous with the subject of that discourse. The conflicts in Lion in the Streets, far from moving towards resolutions that leave characters and audiences satisfied that things must be as they are, present occasions for potential—and potentially redemptive—transformation. The audience is not allowed to settle comfortably into a single, consistent, or unified way of viewing or empathizing with the characters, to identify actor with character, to feel superior awareness to the characters, or to construct any but provisional narratives with which to contain and comprehend the action. And to the extent that the play invokes closure, it does so without authority; that is, it invites the audience to make sense, to take responsibility for the meanings and for the world that its members individually construct from their own distinct subject positions. At the conclusion

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