After Fanny and Alexanderadaptation of the screenplay by Ingmar Bergman, Sophie Cadieux and Félix-Antoine Boutin continue to use the stage of the Denise-Pelletier theater as a fertile and disturbing place of mediation between the world of children and that of adults. With Donkey skina show very freely inspired by the tale of Charles Perrault, published in 1694, and borrowing without embarrassment from the version of the Grimm brothers, but especially from that of Jacques Demy, the tandem questions the numerous and perpetual demands made on women.
From the first minutes, we plunge without resistance into the enigmatic universe designed by Max-Otto Fauteux (scenography), Julie Basse (lighting) and Marie-Jeanne Rizkallah (props). In the stable where Little Skin has just been born, the king’s voice, filled with pride, comes from a gilded piece of furniture in the center of which is inlaid a record player. Nearby, a donkey, who never litters, but produces very beautiful golden crowns, ensures the prosperity of the kingdom. Then, what was supposed to happen happened: the mother died. “Your body is here,” said the heroine of the story, crying, “but what was behind your eyes and your smile… I’m going to be bored. » Seeking to remarry, in particular to provide himself with an heir, the king did not take long to succumb to the charms of his own daughter.
To escape her father’s incestuous desire, Medium Skin requires the most inaccessible outfits possible. A dress the color of love, resistance, vice, hope… As he manages to provide them each time, she ends up asking for a dress the color of a donkey, in other words the fur of the animal which guarantees the sovereign his wealth. Clad in the skin of the beast, the young woman flees, or rather chooses exile. Then begins, in an improbable car wash, a training given to the novice by her godmother, a most rigorous physical and spiritual apprenticeship, an initiatory ritual which is reminiscent of The Karate Kid Or Kill Billbut above all a feminist training camp that slowly but surely unravels centuries of patriarchy. “There is still a long way to go before freedom,” says the eldest.
To play the heroine and her godmother, we couldn’t dream of better than Sophie Cadieux and Éric Bernier. She and her determined candor. Him and his fantastic madness. Their interpretation, transcended by an irrefutable complicity, is inseparable from Elen Ewing’s fabulous costumes, so many skins with which the protagonists adorn themselves or free themselves. While Bernier appears with a vape in hand in breathtaking dresses citing several eras at once, clever juxtapositions of various fabrics which carefully accompany the unfolding of the story, when they do not directly contribute to clarifying it, Cadieux evolves in more sober clothes , but always very revealing of the state of mind of his character.
Free yourself from the tale
Translating childhood on stage, a malleable period of all possibilities, of all the revolts to succeed, of so many quests to accomplish, is not easy. To achieve this, the story is a tempting, prodigiously psychoanalytic, but perilous path. It’s not Joël Pommerat who wants it. In a perfect balance of humor and seriousness, terror and laughter, an iconoclastic approach, but never histrionics, the feminist fable of Boutin and Cadieux unfolds the immemorial story, celebrates its theatricality, illuminates its contemporaneity. We delight in the playful and fanciful way in which the archetypes of the tale, the convoluted formulas, the sweeping predictions, the incontestable assertions and the immutable spells are summoned. Borrowing from Michel Legrand as well as Abba, the rich soundtrack developed and composed by Antoine Bédard does much more than escort the dramaturgy of the show; it largely contributes to giving it contrasts and relief.
At the end of his training in the complexity of the world, a vast program where multiple traps were set for him by his godmother in order to sharpen his critical mind, where appearances turned out to be deceptive, and the princes very disappointing, but where the truth ended up rising like the phoenix from the ashes, the heroine faced the terror, that is to say she freed herself, she emancipated herself, she escaped the tale -shackles, that she got rid of the roles that were until then imposed on her.
After Donkey Skin, then Donkey Skin, it is Peau-Paysage, the fruit of the last metamorphosis, which addresses us: “She heard somewhere that the important thing is not what the we are made of ourselves, but what we make of ourselves is what we are made of. So she wonders how to get up without putting her foot on the next person’s head. How to become, without resentment, larger than ever. » We can bet that the adolescent audience of the Denise-Pelletier theater will recognize themselves in this quest for autonomy which consists of being fully themselves without taking anything away from others.