by AMY BARRATT

Playwright Larry Tremblay is bugged about television. And it's not just the current spate of reality shows that's got him all worked up. His play Téléroman, currently stopping at La Licorne in the midst of a tour, was originally created back when fiction still ruled the airwaves, in 1997. The Théâtre des Fonds de Tiroirs production is a remount of one they did in Quebec City in 2003.

The content of the play is this: a group of amateur dancers has been assembled by "brilliant" young choreographer Christophe to interpret his "experimental, visionary" work, Cheval. The play begins with Christophe (played by the director, Frédéric Dubois) appearing on a series of screens across the back of the set and speaking about his project in a hilarious send-up of artistic pretensions. Dubois only ever appears on screen, usually to berate his "talentless" young troupe.

Attired in bronze tights and leotards, with absurdly bad wigs on their heads, the seven dancers seem simultaneously naked and sexless. They are just a group of strangers until Emmanuelle (Marie-Christine Lavallée) admits that she watches - that she is quite obsessed in fact - with the téléroman Piscine Municipale. One by one, the others own up to being fans as well. Piscine Municipale then becomes for them not just a topic of conversation, but a way of interacting with each other. Two dancers, Hughes and Ludovic, carry on whole conversations with each other, and act out their attraction to each other as two characters from the show.

Although the play doesn't deal directly with reality TV, it evokes it in the characters' monologues recalling their childhoods. Although they are relating things that really happened, it all sounds rehearsed, and also strangely generic, as if even the language they use is picked up from the media and pop psychology. For me, this also recalled the theatrical phenomenon of the collective creation, in which actors are encouraged to make drama out of the events of their own lives. You can't help noticing that all of the characters have had comfortable middle-class upbringings and you can't help thinking what a bunch of cry-babies they are.

The look of the piece is very theatrical, and this is a big part of Tremblay's message: that theatre is not TV and shouldn't try to look and sound like it.

The actors display an impressive unity of style and tone. Each one knows exactly what he or she is trying to convey. This probably comes in part from having lived with the material for so long. Far from being bored with the work by this time, they all seem to revel in it, creating the comedy through their characters' utter seriousness.

I'll think of them the next time I'm chatting with someone about the latest episode of Six Feet Under or Les Bougon.

Rockaby, baby

Independent theatre is cropping up in the strangest places this season. Gleams Theatre, founded and lovingly nurtured by Constantin Sokolov and Ira Sokolova, performs in the library of Westmount's Victoria Hall. Their emphasis is on introducing international work to a Montreal audience. This weekend, under the title Rockaby, they are presenting four short plays by Samuel Beckett, none of which has ever been produced in this city before. Performances are April 30 and May 1, at 8 p.m. Tickets $15–$20, 934-0535.

Téléroman is at La Licorne (4559 Papineau)
until May 14, 523-2246

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