Constructing Fictions of an Essential Reality or 'This Picksur Is Niiiice': Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets

Abstract

Examining Judith Thompson's most recent stage play, Lion in the Streets, this paper treats the play first as aunified realist text which refers to a 'knowable' reality and second, as a text which foregrounds its own construction and problematizes a perception of reality as essential and static. The first approach posits the play as a mimetic representation of a current social reality and reads the play to identify some contemporary social problems, particularly problems of oppression related to perceived social differences. The second approach reads the play as discursively produced text and examines the way the play supports an understanding of all apparent realities as fiction. The second approach problematizes the stability of perceived realities, encouraging us to view problems identified in the first reading as not intractable but subject to change. In combining these two approaches I hope to show that they may be seen as compatible, as well as politically expedient, when what appears to be an 'essential' reality is considered within an anti-essentialist framework as a necessary but provisional fiction.