Down on the farm

>> Toronto's The Drawer Boy becomes Les Etoiles d'Angus

by AMY BARRATT

As plays within plays go, this one's a pretty good in-joke.

It's 1972. A young actor named Miles (Stephan Allard) appears at the kitchen door of a rural Ontario farmhouse and asks the two bachelor farmers if he can work for them in exchange for room and board. He is involved in a theatre project, you see, with a Toronto company, and wants to study farm life.

This is the premise of Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, which was first produced at Passe Muraille Theatre in Toronto in '99, and won a Dora Award for best new play. It has become a phenomenal Canadian success story, with productions now playing, or opening in the next few weeks, in Toronto, Brockville, Calgary, Winnipeg, Victoria, New Brunswick and even Chicago. As Les Etoiles d'Angus, it is currently receiving its Montreal premiere in French at Théâtre Prospero, produced by the Rimouski-based Théâtre des gens d'en bas.

Translated and directed by André Thérien, better known as an actor-singer (Les Misérables), this is a restrained production that never goes for the cheap laugh--to the point where you almost wish it would. I've seen English shows that played down the humour in a script as if they were afraid you'd keep laughing once things got serious; I've rarely seen this on the French side, where they seem to understand that the more you laugh, the greater your heartbreak when things begin to go badly. That said, this production still does a fine job with the heartbreaking second act. Franco-Manitoban actor Jean-Louis Hébert turns in a particularly moving, dignified performance as Morgan, one of the two farmers.

The English title doesn't refer to those things we keep our socks in but to the fact that the other farmer, Angus (Pierre Collin), loved to draw as a youth: he was a "draw-er." The French title refers to another of Angus's abilities, one that may have developed since a war injury robbed him of his short-term memory: he can do large sums in his head and can even supposedly calculate how many stars are in the sky on a given night.

Apparently nobody involved in this production shares Angus' proficiency with numbers. Could they not figure out that if the two friends went to war as very young men in the early '40s, in 1972 they should be in their early 50s at most? Hébert can almost pass but Collin has been aged to look about 70. I know the guy's had a hard life but this is ridiculous.

Apart from that one glitch, everything about this production looks fine. The touted original music by Kate and Anna McGarrigle is barely in evidence, with track after track of nondescript country music (not the McGarrigles) inexplicably filling most of the empty air.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that Passe Muraille Theatre produced The Farm Show in 1972, a collective creation that bears a striking similarity to the show the young Miles is involved in. The in-joke kind of works for Théâtre des gens d'en bas too, since that company came into being in the '70s and also produced collective creations.

Les Etoiles d'Angus, to March 31 at Théâtre Prospero, 526-6582