Lion in the Streets by Judith Thompson
Judith Thompson’s cruel and beautiful play Lion in the Streets was first staged in 1990 at the duMaurier Theatre Centre in Toronto, Ontario and has become something of a Canadian classic. The play is a circular series of interconnected portraits of Torontonians behind closed doors. We first encounter a nine-year old Portuguese girl, Isobel, searching for her home. Isobel, is in fact a ghost, murdered 17 years prior to the start of the play. As Isobel searches for her home she encounters a series of frightening and disturbing vignettes that prompt her to eventually search for her murderer, leading to an inevitable confrontation.
I first encountered the play in 2002 as a second-year undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in a production directed by Kathleen Weiss. Stephen Heatley, Chair of the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC, notes that despite its relatively short life, UBC has staged it three times, most recently in 2019. There is clearly something about the play that captures the imagination so that we keep returning to it. Thompson herself did too, never stopping rewriting and revising the piece. Each time it is staged, it takes on different meaning. The most recent Canadian production is an audio drama, produced during the pandemic in 2021 by Tarragon Theatre, which has been reimagined by director Djanet Sears and incorporating Jamaican Language, translated by d’bi young anitafrika.
What new meanings are created by staging Lion in the Streets in the UK? When I suggested the play to BA (Hons) Acting Course Leader Claudette Williams while planning the 2021-22 season of public production work, she was equally fascinated by this strange piece, as was the director Robert Styles. Strange that this little Canadian piece could have resonance beyond Canada’s borders.
On the one hand there is something quite universal about Thompson’s willingness to depict the worst aspects of humanity, the self-destructive appetites of the Freudian drives, the parts of ourselves we hide under manners and respectability. Each scene in the play shows how people can be driven to destroy themselves and others by their desire. As Jerry Wasserman writes in his introduction to the play in Modern Canadian Plays, Thomson explores “what she calls ‘the huge chasm’ between the rational, everyday self we like to think comprises our life and the dangerous, primeval places where so much of our real life goes on.”
On the other hand, there is a lot of specifically Canadian context and reference in Lion, even if it’s not obvious at first: references to Quebec separatism, a geography that covers Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, local social contexts (Isobel’s Portuguese background and the discrimination she faces refers to a specifically Canadian history of immigration). This cultural context, which is both so familiar to the UK and yet entirely different, is a challenge for the cast and creative team, few of whom have familiarity with Canada, let alone Toronto. Accents were another challenge: the Anglophone Canadian accent sounds American and yet is a distinctive thing. I have certainly become more aware of my “outs” and “abouts.”
So is Lion a “Canadian” play? And if so, what makes it “Canadian”? Like, what even is Canada, eh? What is Canadian identity beyond a vague set of signifiers like lumberjacks, maple syrup, hockey, snow, and Céline Dion? We know we’re not Americans, but can we say positively what we are? The philosopher Mark Kingwell wrote “in a good way” about Canadians’ “annoying and apparently eternal discussion of Canadian identity.” He suggests that “[Canada] is one of the world’s truly postmodern nations; there is no Canadian identity save the ongoing question of what that identity is.” The identity is the searching. Northrop Frye suggested that Canadian identity was a negotiation of place, less “who am I” than a riddle like, “where is here?” Years later Vancouver experimental theatre makers The Electric Company would answer Frye’s riddle in their performance Tear the Curtain!, with another riddle: “we are here.”
But who is that “we”? That’s been increasingly difficult to answer. As the child of immigrant parents, I have always felt pride and taken comfort in the national mythology of Canada’s multicultural state. “Our diversity is our strength”, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau endlessly repeats. But the years since the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action to redress the legacy of First Nations residential schools have seen little structural change, and the government has also done little to address the ongoing disappearance and murder of Indigenous Women and Girls. In light of the the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves for Indigenous children at sites of former residential schools, the #CancelCanadaDay protest has called for a day of critical reflection on the past, rather than celebration. Canada is also seeing the rise of anti-Asian racism in major cities (with Vancouver, my hometown, experiencing a 717% rise in attacks against Asian Canadians) and the recent “Freedom Convoy” protests in Ottawa have shown the spectre of Trump-style populism in the country. Among other things, these events reveal that Canada is a settler-colonial country still grappling with its own history.
Watching the final rehearsal before the fit-up and tech, I was struck by how this 1990 play takes on these questions, if only in a way that wasn’t very obvious to me when I first encountered it. The play circles and spins out from a founding act of violence that takes place on July 1st. Canada Day. Indeed, this act of violence is preceded by another, also on Canada Day. Or, as Isobel puts it: “day for Canada birthday.” In a sense, then, Thompson is pointing to the violence of the founding of the settler-colonial nation state, and, in the scenes that follow, the way this plunder and genocide haunts everyone in the play and, like a returning circle, provokes further acts of abuse and cruelty, despite their best efforts to hold things together. Seeing the play in the context of recent years, it is astonishing how obvious this now is, though, in my research I can find no scholarship making reference to the play’s critique of settler-colonialism. Perhaps it takes a bit of distance—like staging the work in another national and cultural context—to see it. The work of Robert and the cast, crew and creative team has brought this subtext into focus for me, even if I don’t think it is explicit in the staging. The ideas are embodied in acts of performance and design, from the in-the-round staging, to the circular sweep of movement by GH Zonana, to the tornado of collateral damage (by Nicolai Hart-Hansen) hovering above the stage. They are embodied in the discoveries of non-Canadian actors working through Canadian characters in voice, speech, and performance.
But this is just my interpretation as a Canadian who’s lived in the UK for nearly 17 years. It may not be the same for London audiences, or even other Canadians. And that’s ok. The wild, expressionistic spiral of Thompson’s text invites us to endlessly revise our interpretations, just like we endlessly revise our ideas of what it means to be Canadian.
Central’s student production of Lion in the Streets by Judith Thompson runs 10-12 March 2022 in the Webber Douglas Studio.
This production is by arrangement with the Author’s Agent: Great North Artists Management / 350 Dupont Street / Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
View full cast and credits on the Lion in the Streets event webpage.
Dr Broderick D. V. Chow is a Reader & Director of Learning, Teaching and Inclusion at Central.