Enoch Arden in the Hope Shelter
by Judith Thompson
based on Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” and the melodrama for piano by Richard Strauss
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’s 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.” 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.
“…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
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