While most of her contemporaries are preoccupied with evolution and progress, expansion and growth, Maude Landry is engaged in a process of involution, hence the title of her first solo show, which had its Montreal premiere. Tuesday evening at the Gesù. With great skill, the 31-year-old comedian, winner of the Oliver Discovery of the Year in 2018, leads his audience into a mad introspection, a scholarly delirium, an irresistible incursion into the maze of his galloping thought. .
No way for Maude Landry to land as a rock star. No question of jumping in the beams of light like a boxer about to deliver a decisive match. There is no question of letting the frantic pace of one’s environment or era impose itself. With this nonchalance of which she has the secret, she sets the tone of the show as soon as she enters the stage: mounted on a skateboard, a helmet on her head – you can never be too careful – she crosses slowly, very slowly, a plateau littered with old lamps and plastic plants. Let’s go for a carousel ride in the sinuous mind of a woman who casts on herself and on the world around her a singular and hilarious look.
Several registers intersect in the stand up by Maude Landry. Starting with many clever observations, observations that very often take an interrogative form. Impossible then not to think of Pierre Légaré or André Sauvé. But Landry’s philosophical reflections are specific in that they are most often linked to his personal history, his setbacks with mental health, patriarchy or insomnia. Casually, it is about the dictates of beauty, the pangs of seduction and the tyranny of success, in short, an almost perpetual cohabitation with humiliation and anxiety.
But do not believe that the evening is demanding, far from it. As a counterpoint to his few alarming observations, the comedian pours out a river of ramblings, each more funny than the next. Launched into a prodigious roost, Landry develops theories as smoky as they are captivating about animal life and what humans would have to learn from it. Dogs, cats, dolphins and skunks are just some of the members of the impressive menagerie she invites on stage. A real hit in the making, the song dedicated to the “hornless unicorn silly” is a pure delight, a peak in this absurd register in which the comedian evolves like a fish in water.
Undeniably, Maude Landry practices what is known as intelligent humour. Intelligent because it is steeped in doubts and questions, because it is irrigated by indignation and insubordination, but above all because it reveals the significant contribution of each individual reflection in the collective transformation that imposes itself.