When Alain Farah started writing A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers (Le Quartanier, 2021) — a frontal, daring and autobiographical story of 500 pages which has aroused enthusiasm since its publication — he had set himself a clear challenge: to write a real novel, anchored in modernity, with a beginning, a middle, an end, a well-oiled mechanism, a good dose of dissected neuroses and catharsis.
It may therefore seem surprising that Songs of a Thousand Secretsa theatrical reading of the work imagined by the author and the director Marc Beaupré for the International Festival of Literature (FIL), rather takes up certain traditions from the oral tradition of ancient Greece.
“As soon as I read it for the first time, I told Alain that he had written something that was epic,” explains Marc Beaupré. In this telescopic narrative, we meet characters who pull tragedies with them, and everything takes on meaning through the sacrament of marriage and the promise of love and commitment it represents. We start from a single day that explodes in time and space, from 1952 to 2015.”
Choruses and narrative poetry
As a playwright and director, Marc Beaupré has a great knowledge, even a mastery, of classical works. “Choirs are my thing,” he exclaims. The duo therefore chose to approach the text like the poets of Homeric Greece and to divide it into songs. “At the time, theIliad and theOdyssey were so well known that when the performers arrived in a village, the inhabitants could ask to hear Canto 12 specifically, on the wrath of Diomedes, and the troupe complied. »
This time, spectators will be invited to listen to the Canto 3 (Insomnia, protocol) — the third chapter of the novel. “We want to offer an experience that comes from what theatrical mechanics allows, and that it is the only one to allow. We’re not going to tell the story with the characters on stage or pretend. We go there by voice. We chose a chapter in interior monologue, and as the work of Marc with the choirs upsets me, I suggested that he integrate them”, specifies Alain Farah.
The author, who is also the main character of the novel, will therefore be joined on stage by four other performers, who will act as both interlocutors and narrators. “The character has bouts of insomnia, anxiety, no longer recognizes himself. We had a lot of fun with the concept, which makes it possible to explode the streams of consciousness, and therefore the voices. »
These screenplay choices allow the artists to exploit the absence of spatiotemporal constraint specific to literature, as well as the intertextuality included in the work of Alain Farah.
“Aristotle contrasted the narrative poetry of Homer with the dramatic poetry of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. He asserted that narrative poetry allowed more permissiveness, since it could also fall into scenic incarnation. In Alain’s text, the narration, which is a string of disparate thoughts, refers to conversations, to sentences said the day before, to past events. We try to approach all that scenically, in particular by bringing the physical text on stage. There will be a large binding that will give it a sacred aspect, which will symbolize the heart of what we want to do: tell a story. It allows us to get out of space-time in the time to say it, since we are not trying to represent anything of what is said”, explains Marc Beaupré.
Multiplication of voices
The stage adaptation also resulted in modifications, additions and substitutions to the original material – “We keep saying jokingly: we reprint, we reprint! —, a situation that also recalls the many versions of theIliad and of theOdyssey which circulated orally, before being definitively put down on paper. “It even seems that, in some editions, some songs come up twice, in two different versions. The passages were so extraordinary in the oral tradition that it was impossible to choose between the two”, explains the director.
“The fantasy of the single author was consolidated in the 19e century. We have this idea that a work, to be great, must come from the head of a single person. However, the story of the Trojan War, surely one of the best stories in the world, still fascinates us today. It’s not surprising, when you think that it has been told and refined by dozens of people, over hundreds of years,” emphasizes Alain Farah.
It is with this philosophy in mind that the writer witnesses the multiplication of his book in other forms. In August, we also learned that the novel would be brought to the big screen by director Philippe Falardeau (The left half of the fridge, Mr. Lazhar).
“With my publisher, our only criterion was that the creator who would adapt my work appropriates it, that he thinks it from his own medium. To see that my book generates enough enthusiasm to inspire other artists is a gift. All I ask of them is to distort it. For things to travel, you have to get out of this idea of ownership. »
As far as the theater is concerned, the two accomplices also hope to eventually be able to give life to other songs and make this adventure a lasting one. “We just have to hope that the public will be there at the FIL”, launches Alain Farah.