The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

tion of the cosmogony behind The
Martyrology will prove invaluable to all
future students of the poem.
Niechoda often alludes to future sections
of the poem in order to show how what
seemed too inchoate to both the writer and
many of his readers when Books 1 and 2
appeared would be integrated into the formal
explorations the poem continued
through to its too early ending. These
remarks suggest that she will be able to do
the necessary work to complete what she
has begun in this book, even without the
personal help she received from Nichol,
especially as she has access to his papers
(she has already edited one of his unfinished
manuscripts for publication: Truth: A
Book of Fictions). Meanwhile, A Sourcery for
Books 1 and 2 ofbpNkhol's The Martyrology
offers all those who already love bpNichol's
great poem as well as all those who may
someday read it a number of necessary
handles. I can only hope the next volumes
are on the way, and that the publishing
support they will continue to require will
be forthcoming. Too many such major
works are neglected today simply because
the scholarly contextualizations they
demand are not available. I am most grateful
to Irene Niechoda for providing the
beginnings of such scholarship in this brilliant
little book.
Emotions and Facts
Judith Thompson
Lion in the Streets. Coach House Press $9.95
Heather McCallum and Ruth Pincoe
Directory of Canadian Theatre Archives.
Dalhousie University, School of Library and
Information Studies $24.95
Reviewed by Kathy Chung
Judith Thompson is one of the most exciting
voices in Canadian drama. Employing a
stunning language, often of expressionistic
poetry, her plays present an urban world of
violence and terror, desire and cruelty,
involving verbal and sexual abuse, infanticide,
suicide, and murder. Her drama is a
visceral experience which assaults the audience,
engulfing them in her characters' personal
obsessions and crises.
Since her first work, Crackwalker (1980),
Thompson has involved more and more
characters in her drama. These characters
come from increasingly diverse levels of
social class, ethnicity, and physicality.
Crackwalker depicts the relationship between
two couples from the lower working class.
In Lion in the Streets, Thompson uses a complex
relay structure in which one character
remains common to any two consecutive
scenes while new characters are introduced
until by the end of the play she has presented
a whole urban neighbourhood of 28
characters in a string of about 18 scenes.
The scenes deal with many diverse personal
and social ills: a woman reacts to her
husband's infidelity, bourgeois parents met
their day care worker, a hypocritical yuppie
reporter confronts a poor woman with
cerebral palsy, a group of affluent children
taunt the child of working-class Portuguese
immigrants, a woman diagnosed with bone
cancer dreams of dying in the manner of
Ophelia in Millais's painting, a man recalls
a childhood friendship and its betrayal, and
a rape victim is verbally abused by her fiance.
These scenes are unified by the continual
observing presence of Isobel, the ghost of a
9 year old girl from the neighbourhood
who was murdered 17 years earlier.
Thompson's greatest strength is her use
of language, particularly the dramatic monologue
in which her characters seem to lose
the common division between a private
and public self. After setting up a seemingly
familiar social context, Thompson's characters
erupt and express themselves in masterful
expressionist and surreal theatrical
moments. Scarlett, the woman with cerebral
palsy rises from her wheelchair to