The Owl and the Pussycat

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Edward Lear's illustration of the Owl and the Pussycat

"The Owl and the Pussycat" is a famous nonsense poem by Edward Lear, first published in 1871. Its most notable historical feature is the coinage of the term runcible spoon. It features four anthropomorphised animals (the owl, the pussycat, the 'piggy-wig' and a turkey) and revolves around the love between the title characters, who are married by the Turkey in the final stanza (of three).

Portions of an unfinished sequel, "The Children of the Owl and the Pussycat," were first published posthumously in 1938.

[edit] Adaptations

The story has been set to music and animated many times, including by Igor Stravinsky and by Laurie Anderson. It was the central focus for a 1968 children's musical play about Lear's nonsense poems, entitled "The Owl and the Pussycat went to see". The play was written by Sheila Ruskin and David Wood. The title was also borrowed for an unrelated stage play and subsequent 1970 movie starring Barbra Streisand and George Segal.

In 1971, a cartoon based on the poem was made by Weston Woods.

In 2001, Stewart Lee performed Pea Green Boat, a stand-up show which revolved around the deconstruction of the Edward Lear poem The Owl and the Pussycat and a tale of his own broken toilet. It ran for a week at the end of 2001 at the Battersea Arts Centre as a workshop performance, for a week in its finished form at The Traverse in Edinburgh (during the Edinburgh Fringe festival) in the summer of 2002, and for three weekends in Jan/Feb 2003 again at the Battersea Arts Centre. Amongst other topics, Lee speculates as to whether the love between the Owl and the Pussycat was a metaphor for Lear's love of another man.