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
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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
Ali Joy Richardson is a playwright, director, and producer. Originally from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, she has been Artistic Producer of Toronto’s Paprika Festival for young artists, was a director in residence with Canadian Stage’s RBC Emerging Artists Program, and a playwright in Nightwood Theatre’s Write from the Hip unit. She is a book writer and director with Education Arts Canada (creating touring musicals about mental health for preteens) and directed In Real Life (Nick Green & Kevin Wong) for Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project. Ali has created multiple hit fringe shows including her solo show Roxy about an unorthodox motivational speaker/self-defence coach. She lives, bikes, and works 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
