To our delight, after Oxygen (2013), Illusions (2015) and drunk (2017), the sovereign language of the Russian playwright Ivan Viripaev resounds again on the side of the Centre-South. First show staged by Philippe Cyr at Prospero since he was appointed artistic director of the house in 2021, Unbearable long embraces is a true odyssey, a romantic and metaphysical comedy, a sentimental and existential drama, a mystical and futuristic tragedy, in short, an unprecedented theatrical experience from which one emerges totally galvanized.
From the outset, we must salute the incredible courage of the director. By its density, its extremely verbose nature, but also by its holey character, the dizzying leeway it allows, the text is frightening. With an assurance comparable to that which he demonstrated in directing Attacks on his life by Martin Crimp at Usine C last year, Philippe Cyr takes on this four-voice score vigorously, without compromising, and with a lot of humour. Under his tutelage, the tangled narratives, the intertwined stories, the intertwined destinies; it all unfolds with clarity. To ensure that irony, derision, cynicism and cruelty pass as well as tenderness, vulnerability, hope and empathy, is a tour de force.
Created in France in 2018, published in Solitaires intempestifs the same year, the translation by Galin Stoev and Sacha Carlson was very judiciously and soberly Quebecized by the director. Quite casually, by focusing on the setbacks of four thirtysomethings in search of the absolute, beings ready to go through hell to taste pleasure and fulfillment, Viripaev questions science and religion, food and sexuality, tourism and immigration, drugs and capitalism, individualism and impermanence…among others! Taking parallel paths, experimenting with second states, the protagonists take us on a journey that touches on both complete delirium and extreme lucidity, an approach that flirts with self-destruction as well as with rebirth.
This time, the term is not too strong; it is indeed a total theatre, a scenic object where each element is essential to the whole. Decor (Odile Gamache), costumes (Wendy Kim Pires), lighting (Cédric Delorme-Bouchard) and music (Vincent Legault) are all essential cogs in the operation of a device that keeps the public spellbound for almost two hours. The action takes place in New York and Berlin, but the four protagonists are like moving celestial bodies, vanishing stars, planets in orbit, stars that are inexorably consumed. Constantly intersecting, the trajectories of Charlie, Monica, Amy and Christophe draw fascinating, scintillating curves in space.
Of Olympic level, the performance of the performers, vocal as well as bodily, commands admiration. While they are suspected of making significant physical and mental efforts, Marc Beaupré, Christine Beaulieu, Joanie Guérin and Simon Lacroix perform with disarming ease. To thus advance on the tightrope between the comic and the tragic, to express an extreme seriousness and to free oneself prodigiously from it the next second, to appropriate a score so rich, so paradoxical, so wacky, parodic and criticism, one could not choose a more adequate distribution. The virtuosity of the quartet is essential to the great success of the show.