| Summary: | In the plays of Judith Thompson there is a common conflict,
that of the animal caged, a metaphor for the battle that ensues
between the conscious and the unconscious, between social propriety
and animal desire. In Lion In The Streets Thompson explores the
relationship of the individual to society. How the individual
personality, through socialization in our modern world, becomes
tormented and twisted.
This thesis offers three separate and distinct frames through
which we may decipher the labyrinth of image and thought in Lion,
and as I approached the play three main questions drove my
investigation. My first interest is in decoding the true conflict
of Lion. Although a great deal of violence is perpetrated between
characters, this is simply a masking of the true violence which is
internalized. Through the application of a Freudian framework the
true conflict is identified and we come to a realization of the
intense and intimate realtionship existing between the conscious
and the unconscious.
The second chapter deals with the spine of the play, Isobel’s
journey. When reading the script I found Isobel to be the driving
force of the plot, yet, in the performance of Lion at Touchstone
Theatre in Vancouver, I was bemused by the way Isobel faded from
focus as the numerous vignettes drove the plotline. In an attempt
to clarify the throughline of the journey, I have incorporated a
Jungian model that exposes Isobel’s journey as the internalized
journey to self-realization.
In the third chapter, the theatrical world of Judith Thompson
is discussed. A world of absolute artistic licence, disinterested
in the conventions of realism, and based in the free association of
image and action. Here we are thrown into a realm of imagination
where there is no distinction between the real and the imagined,
between life and death, between past and future. And Lion thrives
on the internal dialogue of its characters where unconscious
thought and feeling is exposed as the characters are stripped of
their public skins. In Lion, Thompson has created a dream
landscape that leaves its characters hanging perilously on the edge
of nightmare.
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