Judith Clare Thompson, OC (born September 20, 1954) is a Canadian playwright. She has twice been awarded the Governor General's Award for drama, and is the recipient of many other awards including the Order of Canada, the Walter Carsen Performing Arts Award, the Toronto Arts Award, The Epilepsy Ontario Award, The B'nai B'rith Award, the Dora, the Chalmers, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award (a global competition for the best play written by a woman in the English Language) and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, both for Palace of the End, which premiered at Canadian Stage, and has been produced all over the world in many languages.
She has received honorary doctorates from Thorneloe University and, in November 2016, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
Contents
Early years
Thompson was born in Montreal, Quebec, the daughter of William Robert Thompson, a geneticist and the head of the Department of Psychology at Queen's University at Kingston, and Mary, who taught in the Queens Drama Department for many years. She is also the sister of William Forde Thompson, a professor of psychology who composed music for a number of Judith's radio and stage plays, and the granddaughter of former Australian prime minister Frank Forde. Thompson was raised in Middletown, Connecticut and then Kingston, Ontario. She studied drama at Queen's (1973-1976) and then acting at the National Theatre School of Canada (1976-1979) in Montreal. Thompson worked as an actor for a while, but then concentrated on playwrighting.
Career as a playwright
While in a mask class at NTS, Thompson developed the character of Theresa, inspired by a young woman she had met while working as an assistant social worker during one summer in Kingston, Ontario. This character was to provide the core of Thompson's first play The Crackwalker (1980), which focuses on four people struggling with economic hardship, anger issues resulting in domestic abuse, and patronizing societal attitudes. In 1991, CBC reviewer, Jerry Wasserman called the Vancouver Fringe Festival production, The Diamond among the pebbles ... Maybe the most powerful play ever written in Canada about two down and out couples in Kingston Ontario living on the edge, the outer edge of respectability, and trying to make some sense of their lives – to find love and a kind of domestic normality under the worst conceivable conditions. It's a very, very disturbing play and I think a deeply tragic play about the lowest depths one can imagine in a Canadian city. About a Vancouver production with the same cast at the Firehall Arts Centre in 1993, The Vancouver Sun's Barbara Crook wrote, The Crackwalker is not theatre for the timid. Judith Thompson’s first play is a graphic, harrowing glimpse at life on the edge, at individuals battered by poverty, ignorance and hopelessness. It is also a brilliant piece of stagecraft that makes use of every well-chosen word and powerfully dramatic moment to force audience members to confront their own darker sides. If you're looking for theatre that takes you to the edge of hell, The Crackwalker fits the bill.
Thompson's second play, White Biting Dog (1984), was an expressionistic and poetic black comedy about an eccentric and wildly self-destructive family. Her third play was I Am Yours (1987).
Lion in the Streets (1990) uses a structure similar to Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde to follow violent and cruel impulses from one character to another, a route which the ghost of a young murdered girl, Isobel, uses to track down her killer. A penultimate scene which Thompson cut after the first workshop production of the play, was restored for the 1999 Theatre Kingston production, and Thompson has since then included the scene in all published editions. Productions of the play have been held in a wide variety of North American locations, including Toronto, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Vancouver, but also Łódź, Poland.
In 1991, Thompson adapted and directed Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival. A remount of Thompson's adaptation appeared at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 2005. Her adaptation was also performed at the Mainline Theatre in Montreal in February 2008. Her translation of Serge Boucher's Motel Hélène appeared at the Tarragon Theatre in 2001. In 1995 Youtheatre (Montreal) premiered Thompson's first play for young audiences, the multi-lingual Leaves Of Forever, including a national tour. It was directed by Michel Lefebvre with music by Canadian composer Derek Aasland.
Awards and honours
Thompson won the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 1984 for her play White Biting Dog, and in 1989 for a collection of her plays, The Other Side of the Dark. She has won a Toronto Arts Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award. She is the recipient of several Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Awards, including one in 1987 for I Am Yours, and in 1991 for Lion in the Streets. Tornado won an award for Best Radio Drama in 1988. Thompson has received several Dora Mavor Moore Awards from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts. In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2007 she was awarded the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2008 she became the first Canadian to be awarded Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which recognizes outstanding women playwrights each year.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate in sacred letters by Thorneloe University and another from Queen's University.
Major works
The Crackwalker – 1980
White Biting Dog – 1984
Turning to Stone – 1986
I Am Yours – 1987
Lion in the Streets – 1990
Sled – 1997
Perfect Pie – 2000
Habitat – 2001
Lost and Delirious – 2001
Capture Me – 2004
Enoch Arden, by Alfred Lord Jabber and his catatonic songstress – 2005
Palace of the End – 2007
Such Creatures – 2010
The Thrill – 2013
Watching Glory Die – 2014
Hot House - 2016
Who Killed Snow White - 2018
Queen Maeve - 2023