Among the anglos

>> The Centaur tackles the grit and joual of Tremblay’s classic Forever Yours, Marie-Lou

by NEIL BOYCE

“My worst enemies were always people who never read or saw my plays,” Michel Tremblay said once. “They didn’t want to know anything about me...because I was writing in joual.”

Tremblay’s A toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou was revolutionary in 1971, with its unfettered language and savage treatment of religious monomania and the prisons of class and poverty for Quebecers. And in the rebellious daughter Carmen, Tremblay created a symbol for an awakening society.

Long-performed across Canada, Forever Yours, Marie-Lou is finally being staged in English in Montreal (Tremblay was okay with that once the PQ was elected in ’76), in a Centaur production directed by Sarah Garton Stanley.

There is no real plot and the story is simple. Ten years after the death of their parents crash, Manon and Carmen reunite at the family home to talk about what Pa and Ma (Leopold and Marie-Louise) were really like. As they recall years spent with a drunken father and detached mother, we see the past recreated. The parents face us centre stage, stuck in their chairs, like a flickering old movie. Recriminations and insults are thrown unceasingly as all understand they were a family never meant to be.

Alain Goulem’s Leopold is terrific: a wounded animal who bemoans his lousy breaks or lashes out indiscriminately. Catherine Fitch put fire into her Marie-Louise, getting dark laughs, but isn’t really on the right cultural page (rather farther down the 401).

Casting Holly O’Brien as the salty Carmen seemed almost inevitable, so comfortably and with such relish does she fit the role. Anthousa Harris, the pious Manon, does well as a tragic echo of her stifled mother

Less concerned with universal themes than the grit of its own neighbourhood, Marie-Lou is a tough read outside East-End French Montreal. Bill Glassco and John Van Burek’s much-used translation often falters, as when the great slangy expression les yeux dans la graisse de bines—to be bleary-eyed after a long night—gets rendered as a clunky literal “eyes in the bean grease.”

Stanley’s direction makes the play musty for an English Montreal audience and its distinct linguo-cultural points of reference. Marie-Lou was a thunderbolt in its time and deserves to be tackled with fervour if anything more is to be squeezed from the handsome old stone. At least there is hope that new Centaur audiences may discover, and rediscover, a glimmer of Tremblay’s potent creation.

Theatre notes

•Tracy Power’s adaptation of The Jungle Book is a typically warm and well-shod Geordie production. In the endearing story of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, the squirm factor in the young audience was near zero under Dean Patrick Fleming’s direction (besides the little girl who kicked the back of my seat).

Harry Standjofski looked to be having a blast, throwing his belly around as Baloo the Bear and the Monkey King, while Quincy Armorer brought smoothness to Bagheera and Father Wolf. Oliver Koomsatira was a charming and nimble Mowgli, with Kristie Ibrahim’s live interactive percussion the crowning touch to a good story, well told by all, and great fun.

The Jungle Book to May 4 at Concordia’s D.B. Clarke Theatre (1455 de Maisonneuve W.) Tickets: (514) 845-9810, www.geordie.ca.

Forever Yours, Marie-Lou
to May 25 at Centaur Theatre
(453 St-François-Xavier)
Tickets: (514) 288-3161,
www.centaurtheatre.com