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Ourselves and immortality >> Latest Tremblay lives up to expectations by AMY BARRATT
And it's hard to imagine how the rest of the year won't be a colossal letdown. There was a palpable excitement in the house on opening night, as we awaited the return of Tremblay, André Brassard and Rita Lafontaine, three friends who all made their professional debuts at the Rideau Vert with Les Belles Soeurs 30 years ago. However, it was excitement tinged with the trepidation that no play could live up to such great expectations. Encore une fois... is not Tremblay's most complex play, but it is certainly among the most beautiful things he has written. In it, his late mother--always presumed to be the playwright's primary influence and muse--takes the floor with her humour, her penchant for exaggeration and her flair for the dramatic. The small but poignant tragedy of the piece is that Nana's premature death prevents her from witnessing her son's success. "I wanted to hear her one more time," explains the son-narrator in an introduction which was overly long for my taste. (This speech, describing all the plays which this one is not--Medea, Hamlet, Streetcar, etc.--will look nice in the published edition of the play, but is almost unnecessary in this production.) The structure of the play is simple: Tremblay reconstructs conversations with his mother at various points in his life between the ages of 10 and 20. When I first heard that Brassard, Tremblay's trusted collaborator as director of his plays over the past 30 years, had snapped up the role of the narrator for himself, I was worried. He has done very little acting in his career, and it seemed like vanity to think that he could pull this off. Brassard may have had sentimental reasons for wanting to appear in this play, but it turns out that his artistic instincts were right. The narrator is less a character than a frame for the portrait of the mother, and someone who was primarily an actor would probably be less comfortable with that role. Brassard never hams it up, even as the 10 year old, and he has wisely brought in an assistant director to deal with the problem of directing oneself. I am of the belief that the one thing even a great actor can't fake is chaleur. Those who radiate it onstage must possess it offstage. I also believe that as we get older, our temperaments become permanently imprinted on our faces. If you have frowned more than laughed in your life, the corners of your mouth will become permanently down-turned, your brow irreversibly furrowed. The crinkly, smiling eyes of the 50-something Rita Lafontaine suggest that much of Nana's irresistibility is Lafontaine's own. This is not to take anything away from her abilities as an actor. She is one of the finest I have seen anywhere, so technically skilled that her skills are invisible. We fall in love with her and, like Nana watching her favourite actress on television (Huguette Oligny, who was actually in the audience opening night), we wish we knew her. In his introductory monologue, the son says that no one will die in this play, a somewhat perplexing line since we know that his mother must die. And yet, in writing this play--which is destined to be performed in many languages and make people laugh and cry all over the world--Tremblay has indeed made his mother immortal. Encore une fois, si vous le permettez continues through Sept. 5 at Théâtre du Rideau Vert, then goes on tour throughout Quebec
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Spring came early in '98, as did summer. So it's only fitting that the fall theatre season should already be upon us. Encore une fois, si vous le permettez, the latest work by Quebec theatre's reigning monarch, Michel Tremblay, opened the 50th anniversary season of Théâtre du Rideau Vert last week.