Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter
Based on Tennyson's Enoch Arden and the melodrama by Richard Strauss
- Publisher
- Playwrights Canada Press
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2006
- Category
- Canadian, Women Authors
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780887548482
- Publish Date
- Oct 2006
- List Price
- $17.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Out of print
This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Description
Ciel is catatonic and will only express herself through Strauss's music on the piano and through classical song, while Jabber moves in and out of psychotic delusion. Their lives are desperate but they find peace, refuge, and blissful love in performing their own wild and woolly personalized version of Tennyson's classic epic poem "Enoch Arden." This is a play 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.Based on Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" and the melodrama for piano by Richard Strauss.
About the authors
Judith Thompson is a two-time winner of the Governor Generalâ??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.
Editorial Reviews
"…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 and Director Maria Lamont have 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