“We go from political correctness to artistically correct”, launches the director Angela Konrad about the decision rendered by Judge Yannick Couture of the Court of Quebec affirming that the action of smoking a cigarette on stage is not not a gesture of artistic expression and therefore cannot be protected by the Canadian and Quebec charters of rights and freedoms. “Power, through legal bodies, must not interfere in rehearsal rooms and on theater stages”, insists the designer.
According to Angela Konrad, banning smoking on stage is a dangerous form of control: “Not only does it compromise artistic freedom, but it opens the door to censorship. Art is not a safe space. Art is not a space where good thinking, dogmas and ideological postures must prevail. It is simply not acceptable. I am angry and very worried about this situation. “
Already a decade
This conviction is precisely the one with which Angela Konrad has carved out a place of pride for herself in the Montreal theatrical world in just ten years. The German-born director, who settled in Quebec after having studied and worked for twenty years in Germany and France, is at the head of her own company, La Fabrik, in addition to directing the ‘UQAM Higher School of Theater. From Chekhov to Shakespeare via Roland Schimmelpfennig and Rodrigo Garcia, without forgetting the superb River by Sylvie Drapeau, her shows have garnered praise and highly deserved awards.
Created in 2018 from Chekhov’s first play, Platonov, love, hate and blind spots is back these days at the Prospero Theater. Same cast, starting with the irresistible Renaud Lacelle-Bourdon in the title role, same almost naked setting, same ballet of impulses set to the quarter-turn, but not exactly the same text, since the montage produced by Konrad from the translation by André Markowicz and Françoise Morvan (Actes Sud, 2014) has been edited by a certain Michel Tremblay.
“This is a Quebec adaptation,” explains the director. It is not joual, but a syntax conforming to the oral language of Quebec, a speaking from here and now. This spontaneously causes a greater proximity between the text and the actors, a rapprochement, an authenticity, I would even dare to say the truth. This allows us to deepen the underground issues of the text, a more direct access to this labyrinth of meaning, to what is brewing under the words. “
Timeless classics
Since Variations for an announced forfeiture, galvanizing rereading of Cherry orchard presented at Usine C in 2013, the show with which the director made a name for herself in Montreal, Angela Konrad demonstrated an incredible talent for revisiting the classics: “As I often say, I do not revisit classics, I am revisited by them. For the designer, there is no doubt that the characters of Platonov form a community in crisis, an “atomized” society similar to ours.
“What interested me enormously,” she explains, “are the relations between sexes and classes, the way in which economy and love are constantly put in parallel, with all that that implies of lacks and dependencies, possessions and dispossessions, debts, claims, losses, repairs, traffic and transactions… ”After quoting a passage from Alain Deneault’s most recent essay, Psychic economy (Éditions Lux, 2021), Angela Konrad calls up the shocking formula of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: “Love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. “
“We project so much on the other and on our relationship with the other,” she continues. To all the women he rejects, Platonov, in a way, holds up a mirror. My hypothesis is that Chekhov is a feminist author, but that he shows it to us in the negative. This is what makes the play so interesting, but also terribly violent. “
On the horizon
Far from sitting down on her laurels, the director has her wallet full of projects. As of next week, she begins the rehearsals of Vernon Subutex, her adaptation of the first volume of the popular polyphonic novel trilogy by Virginie Despentes, a show that will be showing at Usine C on January 18.
“Reading the novel,” explains Konrad, “I immediately felt the need to dramatize it. Because of the language, very close to oral, full of verve. Then because there is extraordinary material for the actors: 21 colorful characters who will be played by 9 actors. And finally, because of the point: it seems necessary and even urgent to offer the stage to what Despentes describes, to these protagonists steeped in contradictions, caught in a tension between the intimate and the social, in short, to a portrait of society, a kind of human comedy which is not so foreign to the one that Chekhov draws. “
Laureate of the 2021 Jean-Pierre Ronfard scholarship, Angela Konrad will be back at TNM, perhaps in 2024: “I cannot reveal anything for the moment. All I can tell you is that I am going to make a big dream come true. By then, next summer, somewhere around Montreal, the director will conduct her first opera, a creation about the life of writer Marguerite Yourcenar. Hélène Dorion and Marie-Claire Blais sign the libretto, and Éric Champagne the music.
Fallen under the spell of the most recent collection of poetry by Hélène Dorion, My forests (Éditions Bruno Doucey, 2021), Angela Konrad insists on ending our interview by quoting a few lines from the poem The beast which, according to her, summarize the stakes of her Platonov : “ The beast / leaps with its thirst / a taste of cold / in the mouth / our children’s questions / never repaired // we could kill it / and with it / the echo of finitudes ”.