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Seeing Her Again >> And finding her a little wanting by AMY BARRATT
At the opening night of For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again at the Centaur, I was trying hard to put the French-language version, Encore une fois, si vous le permettez, which premiered a scant eight weeks earlier at Rideau Vert, out of my mind. But in the end, unhappily for me, I was unable to forget the original production. Happily for the Centaur, most of its audience had no such problem, not having seen the original. It must be said that the opening night crowd thoroughly enjoyed the show, as evidenced by hearty laughter throughout and an enthusiastic standing ovation. Nicola Cavendish as Nana and Dennis O'Connor as the son/narrator deserved the adulation--they put their hearts and souls into the performance--but Gordon McCall's direction emphasized the comedic elements of the piece at the expense of the tragic. As Tremblay points out in his prologue, this is not a Greek tragedy featuring murder, revenge and general beating of breasts. Nevertheless, it depicts a small domestic tragedy that could be just as moving and cathartic as anything from Sophocles. It seems to me that McCall was afraid to take the production into those depths for fear of losing the humour. The result is that when pathos does rear its head, the audience is unprepared and more uncomfortable than moved. Or was it because I had seen the material before that it failed to move me deeply? I don't think so. My impression of the audience as a whole was that they enjoyed themselves, but that few tears were shed. Much like McCall's Angels in America, Part II last year, the ending, which should have been devastating, fell a bit flat. As this was the first English-language Tremblay premiere to be done in Montreal, I hoped there would be something to distinguish it from a Toronto premiere. Well, it was translated by a Montrealer--and Linda Gaboriau has done her usual remarkable work. But under McCall's direction, the characters, instead of being recognizably Montrealers, are generically Canajun. As McCall is hoping to take this show on tour to other Canadian cities, that was most likely deliberate. But as the French-language productions of Tremblay's plays consistently prove, there's no reason why his characters can't be both specifically local and universal. According to McCall, the characters in his production remain francophone Québécois--it's just that we hear them in English. Okay, so why can't supposedly francophone characters pronounce French names? I know it's a small complaint, but it bothered me in last year's The Orphan Muses and, to a lesser extent, in this show. It's the kind of detail that frays the rope that suspends one's disbelief. I've suggested in the past that since we have them at hand, perhaps we should put francophone actors into these translations, even ones with accents. Michel Tremblay took me to task when I suggested this to him, saying he hoped he wasn't such a bad playwright that his plays needed an accent to be understood. Entendu. Call me provincial or a pain in the ass, but I still don't think it's outrageous, in Montreal premieres of Montreal plays, to expect to see Montreal actors and directors. Otherwise they might as well be at the Tarragon in Toronto. For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again runs to October 25, at the Centaur Theatre. 288-3161.
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A few weeks ago, in previewing the fall theatre season, I suggested that the English version of Michel Tremblay's latest play probably wouldn't be as good as the original. While this may have seemed like an unfair judgment of the production before the fact, isn't it just common sense that a translation, no matter how good, is bound to suffer a little in comparison to the original?