by AMY BARRATT

With both the Centaur and the Segal showing plays by Québécois playwrights that were originally staged in French, we’re experiencing an extraordinary moment in Montreal English theatre. What does it mean? It would take a scholar to decipher that. I’m having a hard enough time making sense of the plays themselves.

Everybody’s Welles pour tous was a great success at Espace GO in 2003. The Théâtre PàP production toured to Limousin, France, and throughout Quebec in 2004, and it won the coveted Masque award for best Montreal production.

Something must have been lost in translation. As simply Everybody’s Welles, in the English version currently running at the Segal, Patrice Dubois and Martin Labrecque’s play is certainly not the worst thing I’ve seen in either language, but neither is it among the best.

Dubois, who created the main role in French, reprises it here in very good English. There’s no reason to think, therefore, that an inadequate grasp of the language is responsible for the flatness of the piece. But flat it is.

Onto the stage—convincingly converted into a conference hall with little more than a wooden podium and large blackboard for a set—steps a mousey lecturer in a brown argyle sweater and baggy corduroys. Having done his thesis on Orson Welles, he has come to present a talk entitled Everybody’s Welles, a nod to Everybody’s Shakespeare, a sort of Cliffs Notes of the bard’s plays that Welles wrote while still in his teens.

Certainly what we get in the lecture is the Cliffs Notes version of Welles’s life. I kept waiting for Dubois to tell me something surprising about the boy genius who made Citizen Kane at the age of 25 and whose career went steadily downhill after that. Instead, he tells us a lot of things we already know or think we know. Much is made, for instance, of the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938. The playwrights do not question the pop culture lore that “1,750,000 listeners were panic-stricken.” Like the popular story that Welles learned everything there was to know about making movies in three hours his first day in Hollywood, the War of the Worlds panic is now thought to have been less widespread than we’d previously been led to believe.

But perhaps this isn’t really a show about Orson Welles. Perhaps the writers are simply using these tidbits of his biography to get at something else. Everybody’s Welles is also about the character of the lecturer. His Welles lecture is interspersed with his own childhood memories, glimpses of a troubled relationship with his father, and of his love life, but it all comes to nothing, or next to nothing. We simply do not have enough invested in this character to care about his story.

Visually, though, this is a very interesting production. The large blackboard turns transparent to reveal another actor (Stéphane Franche) portraying various characters from Welles’s life and his films. Labrecque’s lighting, like Welles’s, is always dramatic.

Even though this one is not a great success, I hope to see more exchanges between our local French and English theatre scenes. They happen in both directions, by the way: Rahul Varma’s Bhopal and Trevor Ferguson’s Long Long Short Long, both originally produced by English Montreal companies, were both seen in French earlier this season. Producing companies need to be aware, however, that it’s not just the text, but the “feel” of the play that needs to be translated.

Everybody’s Welles is at the Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre to March 19. Tix: 739-7944.

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