Play With a Tiger and Other Plays. Doris Lessing

      DORIS LESSING

       Play with a Tiger and Other Plays

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Play With a Tiger

       About Play With a Tiger

Author’s Notes on Directing this Play

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

The Singing Door

Characters

The Singing Door

Each His Own Wilderness

       About Each His Own Wilderness

Characters

Act One

       Act Two

       About the Author

       Author’s Note

       Also by the Author

       Read On

       The Grass is Singing

       The Golden Notebook

       The Good Terrorist

       Love, Again

       The Fifth Child

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

PLAY WITH A TIGER

      This play was first produced at the Comedy Theatre, London, on 22 March 1962, by Oscar Lewenstein, with the following cast:

ANNA FREEMAN	Siobhan McKenna
TOM LATTIMER	William Russell
MARY JACKSON	Maureen Pryor
HARRY PAINE	Godfrey Quigley
JANET STEVENS	Anne Lawson
DAVE MILLER	Alex Viespi

      Directed by Ted Kotcheff

      

      The action takes place in Anna Freeman’s room on the first floor of Mary Jackson’s house in Earls Court, London, SW5

      

      At the opening of the play the time is about nine in the evening; at its close it is about four in the morning

       Author’s Notes on Directing this Play

      When I wrote Play with a Tiger in 1958 I set myself an artistic problem which resulted from my decision that naturalism, or, if you like, realism, is the greatest enemy of the theatre; and that I never wanted to write a naturalistic play again.

      Now this play is about the rootless, declassed people who live in bed-sitting-rooms or small flats or the cheaper hotel rooms, and such people are usually presented on the stage in a detailed squalor of realism which to my mind distracts attention from what is interesting about them.

      I wrote Play with a Tiger with an apparently conventional opening designed to make the audience expect a naturalistic play so that when the walls vanished towards the end of Act One they would be surprised (and I hope pleasantly shocked) to find they were not going to see this kind of play at all.

      But there had to be a bridge between the opening of the play, and the long section where Anna and Dave are alone on the stage, and this bridge is one of style. This is why Anna’s room is tall, bare, formal; why it has practically no furniture, save for the bed and the small clutter around it; and why there are no soft chairs or settees where the actors might lounge or sprawl. This stark set forces a certain formality of movement, stance and confrontation so that even when Dave and Anna are not alone on the stage creating their private world, there is a simplicity of style which links the two moods of the play together.

      It is my intention that when the curtain comes down at the end, the audience will think: Of course! In this play no one lit cigarettes, drank tea or coffee, read newspapers, squirted soda into Scotch, or indulged in little bits of ‘business’ which indicated ‘character’. They will realize, I hope, that they have been seeing a play which relies upon its style and its language for its effect.

      DORIS LESSING

       CHARACTERS

      ANNA FREEMAN: A woman of thirty-five, or so, who earns her living on the artistic fringes.

      

      DAVE MILLER: An American, about thirty-three, who is rootless on principle.

      

      MARY JACKSON: About ten years older than Anna: