ROBERT NUNN
It is generally agreed that the power of Judith Thompson's plays resides partly in their intricate texture of metaphors. This essay proposes that the structure and meaning of the plays are illuminated if we examine spatial metaphors, as they appear in the text and as they foreground aspects of the multileveled sets designed for the plays' first mainstage production.
Il est généralement accepté que la force des pièces de Judith Thompson dépend en partie de l'enchêvtrement de leurs métaphores. Cet essai cherche à montrer que la structure et la signification de ces pièces deviennent plus claires si nous examinons les métaphores spatiales, comme elles paraissent dans le texte et comme elles mettent en lumière certains aspects des décors à plusieurs niveaux qui ont été conçus pour les premières mises en scène de ces pièces dans un théâtre de première importance.
Ici, dans le champ du rêve, tu es chez toi.
-Jacques Lacan
Judith Thompson is in my opinion one of the best playwrights this country has seen, now or ever. This judgement by no means reflects a critical consensus; indeed her plays arouse strong passions for and against. 1 It does reflect my own experience. Her plays are impressive enough in the theatre, but in a sense have most of their impact days, months, years later, like certain dreams that bring to consciousness metaphors that only slowly reveal their meanings and continue to colour our lives. This is the mirror opposite of the process by which the plays came into being: for Judith Thompson it takes years for images and characters to rise from the unconscious or suddenly present themselves in a chance encounter. Chance and dream: the two royal roads to the unconscious for the Surrealists. I am reminded of André Breton's famous saying: 'Desire discovers those objects which permit it to take shape.' In a recent interview, Judith Thompson 'describes herself and the way she thinks with the metaphor of a "screen door swinging between the unconscious and conscious mind."2
As my title indicates, metaphor is the thread that I wish to follow into the labyrinth of Judith Thompson's plays. Metaphor in her plays is specifically theatrical in that the dominant metaphors are always spatial, like the image of the screen door; that is, conceived in spatial terms and inviting realization on the stage. The sets for the three productions I have seen (The Crackwalker at Toronto Workshop Productions in 1982, White Biting Dog and I Am Yours at Tarragon in 1984 and 1987 respectively) have been multileveled and have called attention to vertical and horizontal dimensions and to walls and partitions between one part of the set and another. In the texts there are many metaphors of surfaces and what is beneath or behind the surface always threatening to become visible, for example, the last lines of The Crackwalker (Sandy is describing the funeral of the baby strangled by its father):
They had them flowers round Danny's neck so's to hide the strangle but
I seen it.
The flowers never hid it they just made ya look harder, ya know? They
just made
ya look harder.3
To anticipate the direction I am going to take, I would like to point out how very close that is to the dreamwork as Freud describes it: as in the mechanism of displacement, the accent is shifted from the latent content of the 'strangle' to the manifest content of the flowers, which serves to censor the unacceptable content yet at the same time serves as its vehicle of expression, to allow what Pony in White Biting Dog calls 'the underneathness' to become visible.4
These spatial metaphors are the vehicles with which the plays penetrate two specific areas: social structure and the structure of the psyche. Anne Ubersfeld's chapter on theatrical space in Lire le th6itre is full of insights which apply to Judith Thompson's plays:
Toutes les métaphores qui soulignent le caractère spatial des activités humaines
peuvent trouver une application féconde dans le domaine du théâtre. Grossièrement, on peut dire que spatialiser le monde, c'est non seulement le rendre compréhensible, mais le rendre théâtralisable.5
[All metaphors which stress the spatial character of human activities can find fruitful application in the realm of the theatre. Broadly speaking, we can say that to render reality in spatial terms is not only to make it comprehensible but to make it open to theatricalization.] (my trans.)
One system of spatial metaphors in particular is the series of spatial representations of the structure of the psyche which Freud developed. Ubersfeld observes:
[Ulne célèbre note de Freud dit: "la psyché est étendue. Ne le sait pas". Freud et
après lui Lacan ont donné de l'appareil psychique toute une série de formalisations
spatiales.6
[A famous note of Freud's says, 'The psyche has a dimension in space. Does not
know it.' Freud and after him Lacan have attributed a whole series of spatial
formalizations to the psychic apparatus.] (my trans.)
Taking my cue from Ubersfeld, I build the following analyses on a foundation of Freud's spatial representation of the psyche as divided between the 'conscious' and the 'unconscious' and Jacques Lacan's post-structuralist rethinking of this seminal concept.7
The Crackwalker, Judith Thompson's first play, was first produced at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1980 as a seed show. It was revived in 1982 as a coproduction by Passe Muraille and Montreal's Centaur Theatre. Clarke Rogers directed both times; the first production was designed by Patsy Lang, the second, by Jim Paxton. It is about two couples who are friends. Sandy and Joe fight, part, and reconcile. Alan, whose sanity is very fragile, marries Theresa, who is retarded. They have a baby, whom Alan strangles. The play ends with Sandy's recollection of the baby's funeral. The plot is a minimalist rendering of the 'tragic rhythm of action.' Theresa and Alan's hamartia lies in conceiving a child in defiance of Theresa's social worker who wants her to have her tubes tied. Alan tries to transform the two of them into a normal married couple who make a good mum and dad, an effort doomed by Theresa's fecklessness and his own descent into psychosis. The height of Theresa's tragic recognition is: 'Danny? You dead, eh? You not live. You never comin back, eh.' (85) Alan's anagnorisis is: 'I done what I done and I done it . . .' (89). Joe and Sandy, the witnesses of this tragic action, experience 'horror and pity, the old Aristotelian twosome,8 and grow in stature before our eyes.
The Crackwalker: the title itself tells us something about the metaphors that figure in Judith Thompson's imagination. She has said that the play is not about poor people in Kingston, it is about 'the abyss,'9 the depths that are hidden from us, the opaque surface, the cracks in the surface that give us dizzying glimpses of the abyss.
According to Joe, The Crackwalker is the bogeyman that keeps Sandy awake and shaking at nights. (70) It is the play's dominant metaphor, related specifically to an actual person, well known to Kingstonians, who obsessively avoids stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, and related more generally to the childhood game played on sidewalks: 'step on a crack and you break your mother's back': playing with a breach in the taboo against the unthinkable and the unsayable. Cracks are the gaps and fissures in a surface that allow it to be breached. The central expression of this, pivotally positioned at the beginning of Act 2, is Alan's monologue about the terrible image of a cauliflower-like growth in a woman's vagina which he can't stop thinking about:
Did youse ever start thinkin somethin, and it's like ugly... ? And ya can't beat it out of your head? I wouldn't be scared of it if it was sittin in front of me, I'd beat it to shit-nothin wouldn't stop me-but I can't beat it cause it's in my head fuck. It's not like bein crazy, it's just like thinkin one thing over and over and it kinda makes ya sick. ..................... Fuck I'll be doin the dishes where I'm workin down the Tropicana there and it's like pictures burning holes in my brain I try all the time to like put other pictures overtop of that, nice things that I really get off on, eh, that I really like-lambs in a field ... I try puttin pictures of these baby sheep over top of the cauliflower and I'll do it and it's okay for a second then the lamb its eyes'll go all funny like slits lookin sideways just like them snakes and then it'll open its mouth and there'll be them long sharp teeth and a bunch of worms inside and the nice little sheep goes all ugly on me and the cauliflower comes back worse than ever like it ate the sheep or somethin ... (55-56)
This metaphor of the eruption of repressed content through the defenses of the 'conscious' is another version of the play's controlling metaphor. This is what comes through the cracks. Two languages are spoken in the play, the language of the 'conscious' with its clear demarcation between what is sayable and what is not, and another language registering the presence of the 'unconscious' and erupting and in a sense rewriting the text, a violently poetic language, at the same time horrifying and beautiful.
This other discourse is like a subterranean stream running through the play, frequently breaking through the surface, particularly in the monologues. There are four, one for each of the principal characters. Theresa's, which begins the play, is very lightly censored. Theresa's command of the rules of language and behaviour is weak to say the least. Her language is full of contradictions to which she is indifferent, as indeed she is to the reality principle. She takes equal pleasure in eating doughnuts ('I love em') and in defecating: she proudly announces 'You shoulda seen the pooh I done today it was hardly long!,' to which Al says: 'Theresa married ladies with babies ain't supposed to say things like that!' (59) Joe's monologue reflects the fact that he is sane and of normal intelligence. He speaks working-class flawlessly. But his whole monologue flows towards his recollection of the aftermath of the automobile accident that killed his buddy 'the Mayor.' He comes to in the ambulance to hear an inarticulate stream of words from the Mayor's sister which after great struggle he deciphers: 'She was saying she did like his boots.' (33) An eruption of irrational language. He doesn't speak it but he can just make it out. Alan's monologue as we have seen is precisely about that eruption. The final monologue is Sandy's. She like Joe speaks the language of the sane and normally intelligent: she is neither indifferent to the eruption of unconscious discourse like Theresa nor helpless to stop it coming through like Al. To her it is like a foreign language which she cannot understand. But she refuses to pretend it does not exist. She remains loyal to both Theresa and Al, refusing to turn away from the mystery of their thought processes and behavior:
Jeez y'know I don't know what goes on inside that girl but it ain't what's goin on inside the rest of us ... I don't blame Trese though, I still feel for her even . . . I'll tell ya who else I stood up for at that service ... Al, and he done it. Oh yeah, I still consider him a friend. No matter what he done, nobody can say what happened in that room ... (91)
Beneath these levels of discourse, beneath even Theresa's, is the Man's. He is so drunk and drugged that the only language he speaks is an entirely uncensored dreamlike babble of unconnected images: 'Hee hee Church'n Mondee all dee Mondee hee hee hee! . . . Breakin my fa fa pheno phenobarbidoll --barbidoll--NIGGER, YOU NIGGER!' (87): a language which Alan begins to speak in his final moment on stage:
ALAN: Bye Joe. (Crouches in previous position, zipping and unzipping his jacket) Nobody here-but us chickens-nobody here but us guys-don't bother me we got work to do and eggs to lay-and guys to see-(90)
The different levels of speech, from the rational language of Sandy and Joe to the psychotic speech of Alan and the uncensored speech of Theresa, to, finally, the Man's chaotic outpourings, are precisely matched by different social levels. Joe and Sandy are working-class. Alan is a distinct step downward. He has great difficulty holding down a job; his mental instability not only relegates him to the most poorly-paid unskilled jobs, such as washing dishes, but he cannot keep them. Theresa's retardation limits her likewise to the most menial work, eked out by prostitution. The two are on the margins of the welfare class. The Man is at the very bottom of the social ladder, lumpenproletarian, Indian, and drunk and drugged. The psychological and social levels function as metaphors of each other.
What happens in the play is that from each psychological/social level one is invited to look downwards, towards the next level down, with revulsion and disgust but at the same time with compassion and most importantly a feeling of kinship ... the old Aristotelian twosome. Sandy overcomes her disgust at Theresa for screwing her husband, in spite of her lies about the incident, because she understands that Theresa cannot be judged by the same standards she uses to judge Joe's behavior. Her responses to Alan are much the same:
ALAN: I said take that back you ugly bitch.
(He grabs her. She throws him to the floor)
SANDY: You're sad, you know that? You don't scare nobody.
ALAN: I'm no fag.
SANDY: (goes back to lie on couch) I seen ten-year-olds fight better
than you.
ALAN: Why?
SANDY: Why what?
ALAN: Why don't I scare nobody?
SANDY: Cause you're a wimp that's why. Like one of them dogs that starts
shakin when ya go to pat it.
ALAN: How come.
SANDY: How am I supposed to know?
ALAN: Don't say nothin to Joe, eh?
SANDY: What, about takin a fit?
ALAN: About you thinkin I'm like one of them dogs.
SANDY: I won't.
ALAN: Or Trese.
SANDY: Don't worry about it. (44-45)
Similarly we see Joe place compassion over revulsion in his response
to Alan after the murder of the baby:
ALAN: I done what I done and I done it and I fucked it up so I'm payin
for it, get it? I'm payin for it.
JOE: I don't know what ya done. (89)
Alan has the same mixture of revulsion and compassion for the Man to begin with, but cannot keep the balance once the Man tries to dry-hump him, and in a later scene vomits on his sock. Can the tragic emotions penetrate that far down into the abyss?
In production, the audience takes its place in this system of layers. A predominantly middle-class audience, as most theatre audiences are, is likely to find itself looking at Sandy and Joe with mixed feelings. On the one hand they visit such bitterness and emotional violence on each other that the audience is likely to see them as examples of working-class self-hatred. But they regularly throw us off guard by showing compassion towards Alan and Theresa and, as the play progresses, towards each other. Our kinship with them is established by the clear signals that their response towards Alan and Theresa is offered as a model for the audience's response. Their refusal to judge or reject them in their extremity poses a challenge to the audience (a challenge which the figure of the Man pushes to the limit and beyond).
The audience's feeling of kinship with Alan is ensured by the direct appeals he makes in his monologue, that is, at the moment he begins his descent into psychosis and toward murder:
No offense or nothin I don't mean no offense I wish youse all good luck in your lives I was just-like I just wanted to know if any of youse like knew of a medicine or somethin ya might take for this ... (55)
An audience who cannot of course prescribe for a fictional character must perforce follow him along his terrifying downward path. Alan's initial response to the Man, 'Hey buddy-hey can I do something for ya?' (51) places the audience in the position of seeing the Man through Alan's eyes. There is a sense then of receding depths, Alan mediating between the utter degradation of the Man and the relative health and well-being (and wealth) of the audience.
The many-leveled set which Jim Plaxton designed for the Passe Muraille-Centaur coproduction reinforced this multileveled psychic and social reality in a general way, that is, the whole set in its many-leveledness was a broad metaphor of the psyche and of society.10 The dominant visual image, however, was the sewer outlet, the opening of a large concrete sewer pipe, entrance to which was barred by a heavy steel grate. Thompson's note on staging, which appears for the first time in the fourth printing of the play (1988), indicates that the scenes involving the Man take place around the sewer, 'which is prominent throughout the play.' (ix) The sewer has been incorporated into the script. It is a metaphor of the permeable barrier separating the world of the 'conscious' from the world of the 'unconscious,' waking from dreaming, sanity from psychosis. In social terms it is a metaphor for the permeable barrier between those who survive economically and those who do not. The image of a sewer as the access and passage to the 'unconscious' is in keeping with the play's dual stress on the fearfulness of what is just on the other side and on its familiarity-that is our stuff down there, always hidden under our feet. In the Centaur/Passe Muraille co-production there was a thin trickle of foul-looking water issuing from the pipe, but there was room for a torrent.
White Biting Dog is the most difficult of Judith Thompson's plays to grapple with, so far. Critical opinion of it is divided. For example, George Toles considers it her best play11 (Richard Knowles, who directed a production at Mount Allison, would probably concur); Richard Plant, although applauding 'her vigorous imagination, her theatrical sensibility, and her poetic gift,' considers that the play 'is so overburdened with imagery that [to an audience in the theatre] it is finally inaccessible.'12 1 have seen it, read it countless times, am deeply impressed by it, and it slips through my fingers like quicksilver.
Maybe the best way to get hold of it is to consider it a kind of truncated Hamlet Ernest Jones-style, in which the only relationship which finally matters is that between Cape and his mother, Lomia. Cape has come back to the house where his father, all alone, is dying, in order to save his life. He tells the audience at the beginning of the play that as he was about to jump off the Bloor Street viaduct a white dog spoke to him and told him that he was going straight to hell unless he saved his father. He goes about this by recruiting the help of Pony, who is psychic, and who determines in a trance that the only way to save Glidden is to bring Lomia back to him. Lomia turns up with her lover Pascal shortly after having been forced out of their apartment by fire. Finally, Cape's efforts to save his father destroy Pony (who witnesses Cape seduce Pascal in order to destroy his mother's relationship with him); they destroy Pascal, shattering the persona he has created; and they destroy his father, who brings on a final, fatal attack in disillusion on learning that Lomia has only come back to him because she has nowhere else to go. An impression in the last few seconds of the play that the deaths of Glidden and Pony are sacrificial and redemptive seems to me so unconvincing that it is tempting to think of it as a dream -displacement. Supposedly these deaths have cracked the shell of egotism that has always prevented Cape and Lomia from feeling. But the displacement of accent does not disguise the fact that between the two of them they have cleared the stage of all but mother and son; that the only genuine feelings Cape expresses throughout the play are monstrous extremes of love and hatred for his mother; that the only connection with another which Lomia does not fake is with her son:
CAPE: You don't feel anything ... You've never felt anything! ... Not for others, and neither do I. We can't help it. Nothing-gets-in.
LOMIA: Yes it does, it does get in, it, certainly does it-no it doesn't you're right.
(whispers the next line) I hate saying it though because saying it-sort of makes it
true, no? I want to, I try to feel things-I hate it in here, in
this-thick-pitch-everything I do, I do to get OUT. Are you the same?
(Cape pulls LOMIA to him and kisses her on the mouth, not sensually but as if he's
inhaling her)
We-we-touched tongues.
CAPE: (holding her closely, starts in a whisper) I'll tell you one thing I feel. I
feel-I always feel-I want to take you by the hair (does so) and then and then
bash and bash and bash and bash and bash your head against the wall till you-(56)
White Biting Dog was first produced in January 1984 at Tarragon Theatre. Bill Glassco directed; Sue LePage designed a set rather like Jim Plaxton's design for The Crackwalker. It too was multileveled and functioned as a constant visual metaphor of the multiple layers of reality in the play. It is obvious that Judith Thompson's plays have an affinity for multi-leveled sets. It is difficult to imagine them working behind a proscenium arch.
The multi-layered reality is psychological primarily, although subtextually there is a multilayered social reality: Lomia is from a wealthy and privileged background in Rosedale; Glidden does not belong in her world (he is from Gravenhurst); Cape is an ex-lawyer; Pascal is actually Gord from Oakville, a suburban kid under a layer of hip; and Pony is the daughter of a projectionist from Kirkland Lake, very working class. A part of the destructive mix of these characters comes from this clash of social strata.
In contrast to The Crackwalker, the most important spatial dimension in this play is the distinction between inside and outside. Both spaces are represented on the stage. The interior of Glidden's house, as in a cutaway drawing, shows a living room, stairs leading to two bedrooms, the first of which, Glidden's, has transparent walls, and two exits to the kitchen and the street. The world outside the house is signified by a narrow ramp that projects out into the auditorium so far that characters can enter from and exit to the lobby. It is the sidewalk that runs in front of the house. At times throughout the play the mysterious sound of a skateboard seems to come from the sidewalk, always heard and commented on by Glidden ('What-What the heck is that sound do you know I've heard it every day now for . . .'); 13 it sounds for the last time at the moment of Glidden's death. Judith Thompson indeed associates the sound with death, an escape from pain. 14 The sidewalk thus is associated metaphorically with death.
Inside the house, Glidden has been making peace with his impending death, that is, before the arrival of his son with his mission: 'Look at the kettle and think of me, I'm water now, I will be steam.' (7) The penetration of the house by Cape and the others reduces him to absurd hope, utter humiliation, and abject suicide. Outside the house, the sidewalk comes to function as a metonymy of the external forces which penetrate and destroy. It is on the sidewalk that the most vicious scenes take place. 15 It is there that Cape seduces Pascal, exploiting what he senses is Pascal's fascination with him. It is there that Pascal rejects Lomia with the utmost cruelty. Finally it is there that Cape informs Pony that he cannot love her after all, leaving her in a terrible state compounded of her possession by the evil she feels she has opened herself up to in loving Cape, the crushing of her hope that she can save him, and grief at his final rejection of her. The sidewalk is the place of the most dreadful pain, of loss and of the shattering of the self:
PASCAL: STOP. it's not ... YOU, Lomia, it's me. Gord, Gordon: from
OAKVILLE; something's--snapped- . . . I'm different I'm Gord, Gord I got ... different blood now I'm not I'm not who I-who-who-you-(85-86)
PONY: How could I go home, eh? How could I go home to the very people I would have Judas-licked for you? They wouldn't know me anyways 'cause the old Pony's almost squished ... (101)
It is no accident that the sidewalk is located in the midst of the audience and literally connects the fictional world of the play with the real world outside the auditorium.
The contrast between inside and outside is evident in the set design and in the blocking. These function as metaphors of a pervasive mapping of the characters' psyches in terms of inside and outside. Cape to Lomia: 'You've never felt anything! Not on the inside you know that ... Not for others, and neither do 1. We can't help it. Nothing-gets-in.' Lomia to Cape: 'I try to feel things-I hate it here, in this-thick-pitch-everything I do, I do to get OUT.' Cape kisses her on the mouth as if inhaling her. (56) Lomia to Pony: '. . . I-love being inside my skin; it's de-licious in here-everytime I breathe I sort of breathe out seeds, seeds. I feel-I inside I feel like . . . (honest) sewage.' (68) Pascal on language: 'like box cars-shuts out, and kinda locks in. It's corrupt to the--colon-' (23) Cape on Glidden's illness: 'His insides are rotting. It's Latin for that. In-something.' (53)
Lomia has the most appalling metaphors of the insides of the psyche: recalling the deaths of their three dachshunds, run over by a car: 'the poor things were bacchic, gobbling up each others' viscera . . .' (72); she can hear her food digesting, 'floating along in my bloodstream like cows in a flood in India.' (84) As Pascal is leaving her she begs him:
... You can ... feed me. You can stuff me! You can stuff me and stuff me and stuff me till my skin won't hold any more fat and it bursts. And then you can burn me! (88)
Metaphors of eating and vomiting, defecating and farting, occur throughout the play. Cape gags at the thought and later the sound of his mother's lovemaking. Pascal to Lomia: 'You wanted to be treated like shit. YOU WANTED TO BE TREATED LIKE SHIT!'To which Lomia replies: '... only because when you treated me like ... fecal matter, the pins and needles would start, see?' (87) Pony stuffs herself with batter and, she claims, meat hacked from the frozen bodies of the dachshunds, and claims to have vomited a prodigious amount of this revolting mixture in the toilet and in the cups in which she serves Cape and Glidden tea.
All these metaphors of inhaling, ingesting and expelling carry emotional and psychological connotations of penetration and destruction. Likewise Cape's sexual penetration of Pony and of Pascal is an invasion of their very sense of themselves, an invasion and a destruction, like the 'monster of black smoke that hurl[s] itself' at Lomia when she opens the door of her apartment. (25) Pony, explaining to her dad why she has just killed herself, says:
I didn't ... kill myself 'cause I couldn't hack it or because the man I loved couldn't love me back, it was 'cause ... I was invaded, Dad, Dad, filled by the worst evil
... you ever imagined-I guess it happened when I fell in love, on account of I had to open my mouth so wide to let the love in that the evil came in, too ... (107)
These metaphors of invasion and internal corruption are contradicted at the end of the play by metaphors of invasion as salvation. Pony says to Cape just before she exits to hang herself:
I'm gonna swoop down inside myself and pull out the old Pony, and I'm gonna give her over to you. And when she's inside you, you're gonna be saved. (102)
Glidden says to Lomia just before he goes to his room to bring on his fatal attack: '. . . you'll be okay if you let me in. Will you let me in?' Lomia replies, 'I'll try,' but once he has left she cries:
'Let me in, let me in, let me IN' WHAT DOES HE MEAN? I know what he means, but I CAN'T, I'm SHUT, I'm JAMMED I-ohh GOD let me let him-(104)
The stage directions at the end of the play indicate that Lomia 'feels a totally unfamiliar feeling; something inside her is cracking'; as she takes two very deep breaths, her face close to the face of her dead husband, 'her body must look as if a strange chemical has entered it.' (105) She is joined by Cape carrying Pony's body: 'deep within them [both] something has cracked.' (108)
The pattern that emerges from all these ins and outs is a disturbingly ambiguous one. Evil in this play is the inability to let other people in, a psychopathic indifference to their reality other than as instruments. It is at the same time the power to penetrate and destroy the other. Redemption is possible once that shell cracks, letting love in. Yet Pony's utter lack of shell, her uncompromising openness, lets all of Cape in, to her destruction. The same can be said of Glidden, whose openness to Lomia dooms him. This contradiction is certainly not resolved by the apparently redemptive ending, with two dead bodies sharing the stage with their destroyers, two ravening egos locked in a repetition of the Oedipal fantasy.
Spatial dimensions are once again a rich source of metaphor in I Am Yours, Judith Thompson's most recent play, which was produced at Tarragon Theatre in the late fall of 1987. Derek Goldby directed, and the set-again, multi-levelled-was designed by Jim Plaxton.
A brief outline of the play: Dee, on the verge of a breakdown, and alone and shaky, having driven her husband Mack away, has a wild one-nightstand with Toilane, the new superintendent of her apartment building. She conceives. Toilane learns that she plans to give his baby up for adoption and takes her to court, urged to declare war by his formidable mother, Pegs. He is forced to drop his suit when Dee with the backing of her sister Mercy counters with a false charge of rape. Dee goes into labour while Pegs and Toi are visiting to 'forgive and forget.' Toi and his mother, a retired RNA, deliver the baby and abduct it.
The play begins and ends with an image of profound loss: the loss of the dyadic relation between mother and child. The play begins with Toilane's dream of a closed door which will not open-'Where's my mummy?' he cries. In the last line of the play, Pegs has just had a stroke and is unconscious or dead, seated in an armchair, her eyes staring straight ahead. Toilane is holding his baby in his arms and says, bewildered, 'MUM?'16
The first scene is worth looking at in detail. It not only presents a dream, but its meaning is overdetermined like a dream, and since it is played in darkness with only a tight spot on Toi's face, it includes the audience in the dream:
(The stage is dark. TOILANE walks slowly towards the audience, on a ramp that
juts out into the audience, in shoes with a heel that clicks. There is a tight spot on
his face-he is his six year old self, in a dream he is having as an adult. He is
walking up to what he sees as a giant door, the door of his own home.)
TOI: Mum! Muum, I'm home!
TOI: Hey, Mum, I'm home!
TOI: Where's my mummy? (PAUSE)
TOI: But this is my house! I live here.
(PAUSE)
TOI: I do so! My parents are in there! I do so live here, they're in there! I do live
here, I do live here! I do live here! I do live here!
(The 'door' slams. The audience should serve as the door. Do not bring in a real one.) (1)
The loss that this scene signifies reaches far beyond the emotionally-charged memory-trace of a six-year-old child in front of a closed door. That is a screen memory: displaced onto it is the 'lack' that is the key term in Lacan's reading of Freud: the lack that first comes into being in the mirror stage, in which the infant seeks an imaginary recovery of fullness of being in identifying with an object (above all the mother's gaze); the lack that finally and irrevocably defines the subject with its entry into the symbolic order. The Oedipal prohibition and the simultaneous acquisition of language finally shut the subject's being behind the slammed door of repression; at that moment the 'unconscious' comes into being on the other side of the door. In Toi's dream, he recapitulates these stages: The 'mummy' in whom he locates his very life transforms into the two parents on the other side of a shut door, which henceforth cuts him off from his life: 'I do live here'-On the other side of a locked door is where I live. I am shut out from where I live. The 'I' who speaks is shut out from the 'I' who lives: 'here' is where the '1' who speaks of himself is not.
An explication of Lacan by Toril Moi could supply the subtext of this scene:
... When the child learns to say 'I am' and to distinguish this from 'you are' or 'he is,' this is equivalent to admitting that it has taken up its allotted place in the Symbolic Order and given up its claim to imaginary identity with all other possible positions. The speaking subject that says 'I am' is in fact saying 'I am he (she) who has lost something'-and the loss suffered is the loss of the imaginary identity with
the mother and with the world. The sentence 'I am' could therefore best be
translated as 'I am that which I am not' . . . To speak as a subject is therefore the same as to represent the existence of repressed desire: the speaking subject is lack ...17
The desire that animates Toi throughout the play is born in that moment recapitulated by the dream, born of that lack. His through-line is to pass from one object of desire to another-from wanting to be 'intergutted' with Dee to wanting the child he has fathered-a through-line which leads him full circle to the cry of loss with which the play began.
The play is filled with lament for the loss of an intimacy whose only possible model is the relation of mother to infant, signified by the look that passes between them. 'Eyes' and 'looking' matter a great deal in the play. Dee walks out of the hospital where she was about to have an abortion because she has a vision of the fetus speaking to her, its eyes looking at her (28). In the second-to-last scene, Dee perhaps dreams of searching for her baby in the hospital nursery where she has been assured it is (actually it is in a hotel room in Sudbury):
(DEE opens a door. A light blinds the audience. She walks forward on the ramp towards the audience. The audience, to her, is the nursery. She is looking for her baby. She feels purified-through birth-and also through understanding her self hatred, her guilt about her mother-she is now able to love after having grappled with her 'shadow' or 'animal.' She is infused with this love. She sees the baby
somewhere in the audience. [Not picking out an individual, of course.])
DEE: Ohhhhh! Which . . one are you, baby? Which ... Oh!! I see you!! I see you now! Oh! You are so . . beautiful. so!!! I want you baby I want you forever
because I . . love you. I LOVE you Oh! Oh! Your eyes are opening .
.... Hello! hello! Hello!!! Hello! (66)
In this scene a door opens, in contrast to the slammed door of scene 1. An intense light pours out of the open door, almost too strong to look at directly. The baby's eyes open. The mother and infant greet each other. There is an illusion that this love will be forever. Yet the baby is not there. Its absence is what is crucial about this scene. It is an absence metaphorically linked to the absent, dead gaze of Toi's mother as we cross fade to the hotel room for the final scene of the play, linked as well by the white light Pegs sees as she loses consciousness. We see a montage of the severed bond between Toilane and Pegs and the imaginary bond between Dee and the baby (who is not there). The fact that Dee's greeting is directed to every single person sitting in the theatre includes the whole audience in a dialectic of desire and absence.
Pegs laments the loss of that unity of mother and infant (speaking to a taxi driver who is not listening):
...... What happened? What happened to the baby who looked up at me with
eyes when the doctor first showed me [sic] to me, blackberry eyes, the baby I musta
walked ten miles a day in our little apartment, back and forth, back and forth, eyes
closin, lookin at me, lookin at me. Why is it that look goes away? (38)
The mothers-Pegs and Dee-find in that gaze an echo of that lost identity: so does the Dad. When Toi, eavesdropping, hears that Dee is pregnant, he says:
It's funny, I sorta knew I madja pregnant. I pictured you know? While we were doin it. I pictured in my mind this face lookin at me, this ... face. (30)
Toi on the bus gazes at his baby and says:
It's like there's a well, you know and when I seen her, Tracy, somethin pumped that
water up and it filled my whole head, you know it filled my whole head! (62)
The play is full of lament for lost intimacies which momentarily revived that feeling of identity: Mercy's Raymond (the older man with whom she 'did everything but' in his car when she was fifteen) and the honey that seemed to pour everywhere when he kissed her, a feeling she 'certainly never . . . ever . . . had . . again'; (18) the wild sex Toilane has with Dee, leaving him desiring her and mourning his loss from then on. In stark contrast are couplings so empty of feeling that they are parodies of desire. Mercy recalls having sex with her husband: 'we'd just do it in the dark facing separate directions.'(35) She quotes him: 'If you can get it up, you can have it, but I'm watching the Brady Bunch.' (25)
The locket inscribed 'Ich bin dein'-the title of the play-ironically holds out the offer of eternal love, of the desiring subject finding its lost complement in the other, but in fact, for the two sisters who possess identical lockets, Dee's from her Daddy, Mercy's (maybe only in dreams) from Raymond, the locket signifies loss. The promise is always already broken, the desired object is always already a signifier of that which is absent. Indeed the German poem from which the line comes even while speaking literally of eternal love speaks metaphorically of loss:
... You are locked in my heart
The key is lost
You will always have to stay inside it .
For always. (45)
Raymond, meeting Mercy again (perhaps Mercy only dreams this), says:
I dreamed about you too, you know, several times a year every time the season changed. Swimming, swimming in cold blue water, clear; striped fish and dark, inky seals jumping around us, and I turn, and look at you and your eyes, your eyes are toooo ... blue ... And then I'd wake up, look out the window and see the first snowfall, or the leaves had turned . . overnight . . . (64)
Dee's appalling behavior toward Mack and towards Toi has its source in something the very opposite of desire yet intimately related to it, which she describes as an animal on the other side of a wall, always about to burst through.
That animal on the other side of the wall, the recurrent images of shut doors, of locked hearts, of walls ... Perhaps it is significant that Dee feels liberated from the terror of all the life that swarms on the other side of the wall just after she has given birth, and momentarily imagines that she is looking into the eyes of her baby. For a moment the split subject is whole. That split subject--the 'I' who speaks/the 'I' of which one speaks, and is estranged from-the 'conscious' in the 'prisonhouse of language'//the 'radical otherness of the unconscious '18-is the subject of Mack's story of the six-foot tall beehive swarming with 50,000 bees, on the other side of the wall in his bookstore, while on this side, people are 'doing cash, taking inventory.' The first inkling that it is there is the 'slow return of the repressed': 'First just one, buzzing around, then two, three we barely notice, then wham! someone gets stung, something's going on ... Someone could have an allergy, DIE .
(27) Yet when the hidden is revealed, honey pours into the store.
Mack offers this to the audience as a parable of Dee's 'Animal.' Dee is terrified of the animal on the other side of the wall, and has been since she was little. Now that her dreams are getting worse, and her behavior towards Mack is more and more out of control, she is afraid: 'It's like it got out of the wall.'(25) 'I'm afraid that the dreams will seep into the day. That I'll do things . . .' (26) Is the other side of the wall the location of the most extreme contradiction: desire born of lack-that impossible sweetness-and its opposite, a murderous rage at the primal loss-directed at the mother? Of corresponding guilt at having these feelings? Mercy guesses at the content of Dee's nightmares: 'How horrible could it be, were you devouring Mummy's brains and spitting out her teeth... T (26) Possibly the greatest loss referred to in the play is Dee's and Mercy's loss of their mother, whose death Mercy recalls in Scene 21. But whereas Mercy's memories of her mother are filled with yearning to once again be the centre of someone's life, as she was of her mother's, Dee's are filled with a rage at being emotionally abandoned-a rage so powerful it must be repressed and only appears as dream -displacements: the animal behind the wall, the shark 'banging at the shark cage and sliding out'(25):
MACK: ... Your mother, your mother. Remember the first time I went up to meet your mother; you were going on about how scared you'd been on the highway, how you would never drive on the highway again and your mother in front of all of us, your mother turned to you and said, 'Why? Why do YOU want to live so much?' Remember what you did? Remember what you did?
DEE: Don't
MACK: Remember how you shook, you shook in the sleeping bag with me all night you shook with your head in my arms.
DEE: No. (7)
If one pole of the emotional structure of this play is the pairing of loss and desire, the other pole is the pairing of loss and rage. While Mercy turns to one substitute after another for the lost complement of herself, Dee's rage erupts at the signifiers of her lost complement. In the astonishing scene 6, Dee swings violently back and forth between the two extremes of desire and hatred toward the same object, her husband Mackie. As she does soon after with Toi. As she does in her nightmares: 'I have these dreams, I have orgasms, I have orgasms in my sleep, I wake up with my nipples hard but the dream, the dream that carried it was so horrible, so horrible that . . .' (25) As Mercy warns her she might do with a child. What Mercy says of her relation with her younger sister suggests that she was the first victim of this pairing of desire and rage. When they were young, Mercy protected Dee from the nightmare she was already terrified of, sang to her, cared for her in a very maternal way. Later as Dee reached adolescence, she turned on Mercy and took advantage of her own sexual attractiveness to torment and humiliate her sister, leaving deep emotional scars: 'How can anybody like me, eh? How can you like me?' (37) The series of pictures of the growing fetus Dee paints during her pregnancy are by turns beautiful and grotesque.
Mercy too swings violently between the two poles of desire and hate in the memory or dream of the day Raymond gave her the locket with its inscription 'I Am Yours.'(2a-4) In contrast to Dee, the object of these contradictory feelings is finally her father, whom she addresses in a dream as 'you FUCKER DADDY,' (17) whose preference of Dee over her, signified by the locket, is as evident as their mother's preference of Mercy over Dee. Mercy like Dee is driven in the present by these buried feelings. At one extreme she found in Raymond an object who would seem to satisfy the longing for the withheld love of her father; at the other extreme is her ten-year marriage, just collapsed when the play begins, to a cold and distant man who repeatedly replayed the original rejection. In the course of the play she half-heartedly tries to seduce Mack away from Dee; as George Toles argues, she is attempting to take father away from Dee in the form of Mack.19 But the difference between Mercy and Dee is this: while Dee is 'taken over' by the inconsolable and unappeasable animal within, which seeks to destroy the displaced objects of her desire and hatred, Mercy seems to recognize a dream -displacement when she sees one, so that the subtext of her unsubtle pursuit of Mack is clearly 'I can dream, can't IT Perhaps the most touching moment in the play occurs when Dee, intending to bribe her sister into perjuring herself, passes over the symbolic locket with its inscription from Daddy, 'Ich bin dein,' a conflation of metonymy and displacement.
Toi's relation with his mother, which we witness on the stage, bears clear traces of the same opposition of desire and hatred. (In the Tarragon production Toi had large very visible tattoos on his forearms, LOVE on one, HATE on the other.) The dream of the giant door is the key to both feelings: the hatred is hinted in his initial violent and hurtful rejection of his mother's suggestion that he come back home and be taken care of: it is displaced onto his murderous hatred of male homosexuals:
... he just kept, like we'd kick his head and he'd move again so we'd kick it again and he wouldn't stop moving and I started see like a monster from the cartoons with all these snake heads and everytime ya kick one off, it grows another one, right?
And he kept growing snake heads so I kept kickin them kickin them off and he goes 'I think I'm swallowing blood' in this voice ... like Gramma or something but he's a guy, he's a guy, right, he's not GRAMMA, he's makin like he's Gramma and he's a GUY. (11)
The reference to the figure of Medusa points to what is going on here. At the other extreme is his loyalty to his mother, his appeal to her to help him get his son, and finally his apology for a cruel rejection of her when he was in grade four (65). He succeeds in recapturing a trace of the original identity just moments before he stands staring in bewilderment at the empty gaze of his dead or dying mother.
This system of opposites-loss/desire at one pole, loss/hatred at the other--constitutes not only the emotional structure of the play but also its Action. It consists of two parallel through-lines, Toi's and Dee's. They complement each other. Toi's, as we have seen, moves from loss through desire to a repetition of the loss. Dee's moves through more and more violent eruptions of the repressed pairing of desire and hatred, towards a recovery of the lost object that is its source: the imaginary gaze between herself and her child releases her from her repressed hatred of her mother and the attendant 'self hatred and guilt' she has felt. (66) Dee's swelling tummy is the index of both of these Actions, and of the 'animal' that in nine months breaks through the wall: Dee's labour begins with 'a leak, a trickle of water,' through a little tear from a little fingernail, which triggers a nightmare vision of 'a lion, breaking through the wall a lion roaring all the stones breaking . . .' (53)
For Judith Thompson, the personal cannot be detached from the social. The wall that divides Dee in two is also the wall that separates her class from the proletariat. She is equally terrified of the 'seepage' from the other side in both respects. Several times in the course of the play, the 'animal' metaphor is applied to the working class. Pegs recalls with hatred how the middle-class women she cleaned house for would talk to her 'like ya talk to a dog or a baby.' (47) Confronting Mercy after her son has dropped the suit, she cries, 'We're human beings. We're not animals you know.' (51) That animal must be kept shut out. Toi cries out to Dee after their night together, 'You showin me your ... your animal,' and she screams NO! (21) Later, when she is pregnant, she refuses to consider giving the child to Toi: 'I couldn't . . give . . one of us . . to a person . . like that, how could IT (30). Something very like the return of the repressed happens several times in the play when the working-class characters burst through the door of Dee's apartment to confront her with what she denies so strenuously: significantly, they appear to claim Toi's right to the baby shortly after Dee regales Mack and Mercy with a condescending account of her ride with a taxi driver who hates his job and hates what he calls 'the riding public': from her illusory safe distance she can find proletarian resentment amusing. Two scenes later that wall has given way.
The metaphors I have discussed cry out for realization in spatial terms, which the designer, Jim Plaxton, accomplished brilliantly. Clearly taking his cue from the text, he designed a multi-level playing space. 20 At stage right was the superintendent's apartment, later the motel room in Sudbury; it was at the lowest possible level; one seemed to be looking down into a pit. At stage left on the same level was a space that served as a seat on a bus and the interior of a cab, always occupied by at least one proletarian--the Italian labourer into whose uncomprehending ear Mercy pours out her story about Raymond as they bus to Toronto; the bored resentful cabbie to whom Pegs laments the loss of the infant's gaze; and finally Toi and Pegs on the bus to Sudbury. Floating above this space, like a different world, is Dee's apartment. The door of her apartment, then, is the breach in the wall through which what is denied and ignored makes it way: from the other side; from below. An easel bearing the series of paintings of the growing fetus stands near the door, its surface thus associated metaphorically with the breach through which the unconscious contents seep.
One element of the set, the ramp projecting into the audience, is specified emphatically in the script; and I would like to conclude with some thoughts about its function. In some sense the experience of seeing a play is always that there is an invisible fourth wall between the audience and the drama. All the things we see-the set, the actors-are 'derealized' and exist only as signs. 21 They are what they are not. That is, theatre, in its relentless conversion of everything it touches into a sign of something else that is not there, incorporates in its very being that 'absence' or 'Jack' of which Lacan speaks. That perpetual dialectic between alienation and empathy, whose political connotations interested Brecht, is also a model of the psyche. Our awareness of the difference between our reality and the de-realized signs--absences--in front of us can in a moment transform into an imaginary identification that can shake us to the core. As Anne Ubersfeld says in L'Ecole du spectateur, our pleasure in the theatre is by its very nature double:
il est va-et-vient entre le sentiment d'une absence et le jeu avec une présence.22
[it consists of a continual movement between the feeling of an absence and playing with a presence.] (my trans.)
Such an approach to the relation between the work and the spectator's desire and imaginary identification is by now familiar territory in film and television studies: 23 coincidentally, a moment in the play that bears on this is couched in terms of television-Mercy's passionate defense of television: 'IT IS A VOICE A WARM VOICE. THERE ARE FUNNY TALK SHOWS WITH HOSTS WHO THINK EXACTLY LIKE I DO.'(31)
Judith Thompson is gifted at momentarily lowering the level of repression, letting the contents of the 'unconscious' seep through, catching us by surprise with something that seems for a moment more than a signifier whose signified is an absence, leaving us shaken with momentary presence.
We have seen how White Biting Dog also uses a ramp projecting out into the audience to foreground this play of presence and absence. Its use in I Am Yours is even more telling. In I AM Yours, nine scenes out of thirty-six are played in whole or in part on the ramp: notably, Toi's dream of the open door, Mack's parable of the beehive behind the wall, Dee's vision of the fetus calling to her, Toi's declaration of war, Toi's abject apology to the judge, Mercy's dream-reunion with Raymond, Dee's vision of her baby in the nursery. The ramp is the focal point of the extraordinarily powerful affects that the play releases to seep through the wall of repression of which the 'psychic distance' of the audience is a displacement. Significantly, the play takes its time with this: only three scenes are played on the ramp in the first act (fully two-thirds of the running time); all the rest are in the second act. Significantly too, the audience is directly addressed in ways which further accomplish the breaching of the wall. We are the door which slams in Toi's face, and twice we are the infant whose voice and gaze seem to erase all absence and restore all that has been lost:
SCENE FOURTEEN
(Location-hospital)
(DEE walks up ramp towards audience She has felt the life of the fetus inside
her and cannot go through with the abortion. She now walks toward the audience
where she feels the 'flashes' coming from, her hands outstretched to feel them.
DEE: (looks at audience) Is that you?? Are you . . speaking ... to me? I can hear you. I can hear you-I hear ... your voice, are you ... I can hear your voice-speaking. It's you!!! IT issss you, you are talking to me You're
talking to me, yes I can hear, I can feel these, yes, I can hear you breathing,
breathing, your voice, your step-the way you will step on the stairs, a small intake
after you laugh, you laugh, the way your mouth ... when you sleep; curves down;
the swell ... inside you when you see a tree, a beautiful tree one day, a shudder of
cold, your hand being squeezed, your eyes looking at me! Oh! you are . .
you are . . you.... ARE!!!!!!!! (28)
Lack and desire; presence and absence; a wall that is and is not breached; an identity of mother and child that is at once uncannily familiar and a signifier referring to something which is not there ... I AM Yours by Judith Thompson.
In all three plays I sense a dramatic imagination that seizes on spatial metaphors in order to explore the human condition on stage. I also sense a progression, towards a stronger and stronger perception of social and psychological contradictions and oppositions: desire and rage, love and hate, good and evil, Eros and Thanatos. Always there is a permeable barrier, a 'screen door'-the cracked surface in The Crackwalker,4he door between the house and the sidewalk in White Biting Dog, the walls and doors in I Am Yours. On the one side is the waking world, where everything is clearly one thing or the other, the world of rationality, common sense, the 'conscious,' where language functions as a way of organizing and codifying experience.24 On the other side is the utterly strange, yet uncannily familiar, world of dream, nightmare, the 'unconscious,' where opposites and contradictions coexist, where another language is spoken, where the dreamlike play of metaphor and metonymy disrupts all efforts to make simple, unequivocal matches between signifier and signified. Judith Thompson's plays are increasingly bold journeys into the abyss of the unconscious.
Notes
1 E.g. at one extreme, the woman who stormed out of Centaur Theatre during a performance of The
Crackwalker, 'bellowing over her shoulder, "Call the chauffeur, George, we're leaving!"' (DAVE CARLEY,
'A Canada Nobody Knows,'American Theatre, Feb 1988, p 46). At the other, CLARE COULTER, who said
that 'the power of Thompson's writing ... and her experience of playing Pony in White Biting Dog "made me
feel I should examine the way I approach my life"'(NIGEL HUNT, 'In Contact with the Dark,' Books in Canada
17, no 2 (Mar 1988) p 12
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2 HUNT, pp 10-12
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3 JUDITH THOMPSON, The Crackwalker (Toronto: Playwrights Canada 1981; 4th printing 1988) p 92. Further references to this play will appear parenthetically in the text
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4 SIGMUND FREUD, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans A A I Brill (New York: Modern Library 1950).
Judith Thompson has studied Freud intensively. See JUDY I STEED, 'Thompson different from her characters,'
The Globe and Mail, 11 Feb 1982
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5 ANNE UBERSFELD, Lire le th<re
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6 (Paris: Editions sociales 1977) p 158
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7 UBERSFELD, p 160
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8 Writings by and about Lacan on which I have drawn: JACQUES 1 LACAN, Ecrits: A Selection, trans Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton 1977) and The Language of the Self, annotated trans Anthony Wilden 1
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press 1968); MALCOLM BOWIE, ES , Jacques Lacan,' in Structuralism and
Since, ed John Sturrock (London: Oxford Univ Press 1979) pp 116-53; TERRY EAGLETON, Literary Theory
(Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press 1983); ELIZABETH WRIGHT. 'Psychoanalytic Criticism,' in Modem
Literary Theory, ed Ann Jefferson and David Robey (Totowa N.J.: Barnes and Noble 1982) pp 113-33; TORIL
MOI, Sexuall7extual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen 1985); KAJA SILVERMAN, The
Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford Univ Press 1983)
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9 JUDITH THOMPSON, 'The Happy Vessel,' in Still Running ... Personal Stories by Queen's Women
Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Marty Scholarship, ed Joy Parr (Kingston: Queen's Alumnae
Association 1987) p 133
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10 JUDITH THOMPSON, in conversation with the author, July 1988
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11 MARK CZARNECKI in his review in Maclean's commented on the 'ingenious multilevel set, which
provides the precise spatial co-ordinates required to chart the pilgrimage of Thompson's characters from
oblivion to oblivion' (Maclean's, 15 Feb 1982 p 63)
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12 GEORGE TOLES, '"Cause you're the only one I want": The Anatomy of Love in the Plays of Judith Thompson,' unpublished essay
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13 RICHARD PLANT, 'Opening Lines,' Books in Canada Apr 1985 p 23
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14 JUDITH THOMPSON, White Biting Dog (Toronto: Playwrights Canada 1984) p 5. Further references will
appear parenthetically in the text
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15 JUDITH THOMPSON, letter to Richard Knowles, 24 Oct 1984
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16 Information on blocking comes from the prompt script of White Biting Dog, which I consulted at Tarragon Theatre
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17 JUDITH THOMPSON, I Am Yours, unpub MS, Jan 1988 p 66. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text
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18 TORIL MOI, pp 99-100
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19 EAGLETON, p 157
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20 TOLES, p 23
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21 Information on set and blocking comes from the prompt script of I Am Yours, consulted at Tarragon Theatre
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22 KEIR ELAM, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen 1980) pp 7-10
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23 ANNE UBERSFELD, LEcole du spectateur (Paris: Editions Sociales 1982) p 330
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24 See for example LAURA MULVEY, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' Screen 16, 3 (1975) 6-18; and
CHRISTIAN METZ, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan 1982)
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25 THOMPSON: 'People don't believe contradictions exist. You're a nice person, or you're a bad person. It's
difficult, because the people that go to the theatre are the very people most difficult to convince' (JOHN
COLAPINTO, 'Playing With Fire,' Radio Guide, Sept 1985 p 7)
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