Theatre, when it is good, has something lively, frontal, brutally concrete. Theater does not describe life, it brings life to life, live, by making carnal words heard, without the filter of narration, and this, moreover, in condensed form, without wasting time. Quality theater, on stage and on paper, is always gripping, and that’s how I like it.
Volunteering (Atelier 10, 2023, 104 pages), work by the young playwright Maud de Palma-Duquet, who won the 2022 Gratien-Gélinas prize for emerging playwrights, is part of this shock theater which enchants me.
The piece is presented at La Licorne until February 28. I did not see her. The reviews that followed the first performances, however, were so well written and so laudatory that they made me want to delve into the work.
In The duty, Sophie Pouliot speaks of “well-constructed, fleshed-out, credible and even endearing characters”, “dialogues imbued with both humor and truth” and a “percussive and judiciously free of pathos” punch line. In GameAurélie Olivier speaks of a closed session “full of humor and finesse”, of “complex and nuanced characters” and of the playwright’s “very mastered language”.
My reading of the work gives reason to this critical enthusiasm: Volunteering is, in fact, one of the best Quebec plays I have read in recent years. Its content, both psychological and social, shines through its subtlety, its liveliness and its deep humanity. The reader of essays that I am delights in this theater which embodies ideas without imposing them, which provokes reflection without providing ready-made answers.
Anthony, a young man in his twenties, is in the penitentiary because he killed a cashier during the robbery of a convenience store. A drug addict, he needed money. Amaryllis is a model student, from a good, privileged family. Registered for a baccalaureate in biopharmaceutical sciences, she dreams of being accepted into medicine. This is why she volunteers as a French tutor at the penitentiary.
The young girl first tells Anthony that she is there to help, but, faced with the skepticism of the inmate, who tells her that he does not believe in that, “the world is too thin”, she ends up admitting that it is to stand out, given that volunteering “looks good on a CV”.
Anthony is not offended by this since he himself is not driven by intrinsic motivation. If he takes French lessons, he admits, it is not really to learn, but with the intention of possibly obtaining parole.
We are therefore witnessing, as the playwright says in her opening remarks, the clash of two universes, of two relationships with the world that could not be further apart. Maud de Palma-Duquet’s brilliant idea of illustrating this antagonism in the context of a French course. The relationship with language says a lot, in fact, about the human being.
When she discusses the notion of lexical field, for example, Amaryllis asks Anthony to name words related to school. He says : break, battle, punishment, copy, director, detention, suspension. And what would she have answered? he asks her in return. She says : matter, study, readings, library, exams, notes, success And futurebefore adding: solitude, insomnia, dizziness, panic and other dark words. This simple exercise is very revealing.
During classes, Anthony, as soon as he stumbles upon a difficulty – the gender of words, for example -, challenges the relevance of the rules and declares that they were only invented to allow an elite to look down on guys like him. Amaryllis, then, gets angry and retorts that it is not his place to impose his rules, that “it is like that because it is like that” and that it must be like that to avoid chaos.
All Anthony is there: the immature refusal of authority, the disorderly protest and the permanent dissatisfaction attributable to external elements. All Amaryllis is there: the childish submission to authority, the stifling conformism and the dissatisfaction due to inner blockages.
When Anthony asks her, sincerely, why she wants to be a doctor, the young girl, totally taken aback, does not even understand that this question can be asked. In her world, she says, when such a project is announced, people “say wow!” not why? “. However, the only answer she manages to give is “because”.
In the clash of these two existential frustrations, however, a real encounter occurs, a mutual shaking of the preconceived ideas specific to each of the universes. It is the miracle of humanity which accepts, through the words exchanged, to be open instead of remaining in its bubble. It’s damn good theater.