Twenty years after the release of Louis Bélanger’s famous film, David Laurin, co-artistic director of Théâtre Duceppe, has adapted this moving portrait of a changing society for the stage. The play is published by Hamac, after the show by Édith Patenaude toured Quebec. The action takes place in Limoilou in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, in a gas station in decline. The owner of this establishment exposed to a significant increase in crime, François Brochu, is a very endearing man suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a widower and the father of a daughter and two sons. Around him, a gallery of characters who are at the very least picturesque, a community of men for whom expressing emotions is never easy. Peppered with stage directions about the gestures made and the instruments played, the score provides images and sounds for the reader’s mental theatre. Interspersed with evocative silences, the dialogues also highlight the different linguistic registers of a Quebec in full transformation.
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