Review | Oil: very small the planet ★★★

François Archambault has created a large-scale work on the climate crisis with a historical perspective. The result left our review mixed.

Luc Boulanger
The Press

If hell is paved with good intentions, good plays are rarely built with good feelings. In writing Oil, a “documentary fiction” on the climate emergency on display at Duceppe, François Archambault let himself be overwhelmed by his subject. A powerful theme, certainly, but which would have deserved a plot and stronger characters. Here, they only serve to justify a thesis.

For his play, written while he was author in residence for the company, François Archambault (The Leisure Society, you will remember me, Bottoms up) was inspired by an investigation by a journalist from the New York Times. This article explains that, in the 1980s, we came close to initiating the energy transition and solving the problem of global warming.

The play begins in November 2018, when wildfires ravage California. Authorities suspect a respected scientist, Jarvis Larsen, of starting the fires. Flashback in 1979, Larsen (Simon Lacroix, energetic) was hired by an oil company to give his opinion on the role of fossil fuels in global warming. According to him, oil is leading us straight to an ecological disaster in… 2035. Larsen is working on a commission to study the issue in Washington. With environmentalists, lobbyists and US government officials. However, despite the threat of reaching “the point of no return”, no concrete action will be taken.

For nearly two hours, Oil looks back on these revelations about greenhouse gases, global warming, etc. The story goes from one era to another to better expose our collective blindness, our inaction; our comfort and our indifference, to paraphrase the title of a film by Denys Arcand.

Everything is in place to make a hard-hitting ecological thriller… Alas, the didactic text by François Archambault does not manage to grab us. We do not feel any curve or dramatic tension, even if the protagonists live a series of dramas and personal tragedies in echoes of the announced climatic catastrophe.

Edith Patenaude’s direction of actors also lacks cohesion. The director has the performers perform with their feet in the water, a liquid sheet covering the stage. A scenographic element richer visually than dramatically. Moreover, all the work of the designers is irreproachable: the set by Claire Renaud is magnificent, the lighting by Martin Labrecque and the costumes by Cynthia St-Gelais are neat.

Despite the many back and forth between the end of the 1970s, the beginning of the 1980s and 2018, the story always seems to be happening at the same time, that is to say today. Is it the uniform behavior or the very current discourse of historical figures that is wrong? A friend pointed out to me that no character smokes, even while having a drink in a bar… in 1980! Of course, this is a detail and the author has documented the chronology of events. However, if reality goes beyond fiction, a (real) documentary theater play might have been more interesting in the end.

Oil

Text: François Archambault, Director: Édith Patenaude. Interpretation: Frédéric Blanchette, Simon Lacroix, Marie-Ève ​​Milot, Olivia Palacci and 7 other actors.

At the Jean Duceppe TheaterUntil May 14

★★★