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Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter
Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter
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Limited Quantities
Author: Judith Thompson Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press (cover image may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 56 Pub. Date: 2005 ISBN-10: 0887548482 ISBN-13: 9780887548482 Cast Size: 1 female, 1 male
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About the Play:
HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of
copies are still available.
Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter is a full-length drama by Judith Thompson. Taking as starting point Richard Strauss' 1898 melodrama Enoch Arden, itself based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's 1864 poem of the same name, Judith Thompson has written a contemporary story that suggests art as haven from harsh reality.
Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter is about the truly redemptive and empowering nature of art,
and how it can be recreated and reclaimed by anyone with the hunger and
the will to do so. Jabber and Ciel are two homeless lovers who are trying to create a performance piece for the shelter's talent show; Ciel is catatonic and will only express herself through Strauss' music on the piano and through classical song, and Jabber moves in and out of psychotic delusion; their lives are desperate but they find peace and refuge and blissful love in performing their own wild and woolly and personalized version of Tennyson's classic epic poem Enoch Arden. Judith Thompson's biting prose creates a shocking, relevant vision of love and art in forgotten places.
Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter was first produced in Canada in 2005 at Theatre Centre in Toronto, and in the UK in 2006 at Rosemary Branch Theatre in London.
Cast: 1 female, 1 male
What people say:
"This adaptation of Alfred Lord Tennyson's Victorian idyll 'Enoch Arden' is the perfect marriage between Thompson's poetic inner self and her tuned-in social and political conscience. As she transplants the original's love triangle in a seaport town into a halfway house in Toronto's west end, Thompson creates an extended poetic monologue with twists from a character appropriately named Jabber. [The play is] interspersed with singing and piano-playing (based on Richard Strauss's melodramatic adaptation)." — The Globe and Mail
"Writer Judith Thompson [has] reimagined Tennyson's sentimental, love-triangle poem 'Enoch Arden', combined it with music that Richard Strauss later wrote for the piece and created an emotionally rich, highly theatrical work set in a Parkdale rooming house." — NOW Magazine
"It is a masterly display of theatrical craft, from Thompson. When her mind and poetic instincts are inspired by the cause of social justice, there are few to match her." — Toronto Star
About the Playwright:
Judith Thompson, OC
is a highly esteemed Canadian playwright and educator. She has twice
won the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama for White Biting
Dog and The Other Side of the Dark. Other often-produced works
include Sled, The Crackwalker, I Am Yours, Lion in the Streets and
many more. In 2006 she was invested as an Officer in the Order of
Canada, and in 2008 she became the first Canadian to be awarded the
prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring
the best English-language women writers worldwide for
her play Palace of the End.
She is currently a professor at the University of Guelph for the
School of English and Theatre Studies teaching courses in acting and
playwriting. |
Edited by Judith Thompson
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