I knew André Brassard at the turn of the 1990s when, as a young press attaché at the French Theater of the National Arts Center in Ottawa, I had the chance to meet him. Later, in 2017, when I was working on a book on the creation of sisters-in-lawI found it.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
From there, our meetings became regular. I called him and he gave me an appointment at his house, always at 1 p.m. The discussions we had made me feel good. I always came out of there energized.
In recent years, he has been living alone in a smoky apartment on Boulevard Saint-Joseph where I have been several times. Diminished by two strokes, he moved little. He had organized around him a kind of control center that allowed him to watch movies and shows, listen to the radio and read novels.
Because, even confined to his wheelchair, nothing escaped him. Through the friends who came to visit him, he lived the theater by proxy. He knew perfectly the seasons of the TNM, the Rideau Vert and Duceppe, the choices of directors and the casts.
It was enough to tell him that we had just seen a creation at the Theater d’Aujourd’hui or at La Licorne and he would become animated. We then discovered that he had read the reviews or the reports, when it was not the text itself. He knew everything.
When I was too harsh with an author or a director, he made me see something that I hadn’t seen. He who had not attended the performance confronted my judgment and knocked me out. most of the time. His love of the theater was unwavering. He rarely lost his temper, but when the time came to defend this art and the fate that the state had in store for it, the “calice” and the “tabarnak” were heard from all sides.
Talking about theater and art with him was an incredible source of enrichment. He had mastered the art of saying great things in words of stunning simplicity. Those who had the chance to work with him will confirm it: André Brassard was the master of banal images that made immense things understood.
About a great actress that I admired and that he had directed, he told me: “She was like a sailing boat! If there was wind, she gave. With the students of the National Theater School, he liked to use the metaphor of the club sandwich. If, in rehearsal, a budding actor was surprised that he asked him to act out an emotion contrary to that of the day before, André would say: “There’s not just chicken in a club sandwich. »
The man who staged the masterpieces of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Racine and Marivaux had created a very special concept to illustrate his relationship with the actors: the tea bag and boiling water. He has always seen his role as one that gives the actor enough information to infuse. “There is always a way to make tea with lukewarm water, but if there is nothing in the pocket, nothing happens,” he said.
André Brassard was a great intellectual who shunned pretension.
The man did not want the company of others. But when she was there, he was happy. The presence of actors to whom he had taught, authors or directors (like Alice Ronfard, Violette Chauveau and Geneviève Gratton, who have been true guardian angels for him in recent weeks) kept him alive.
He was very proud of what became of the many actors he had trained. When Sandrine Bisson, on receiving an Iris, declared that he had been one of the first to blow on the embers and to believe in his talent, he was overwhelmed.
He didn’t ask for the presence of others, but sometimes you had to know how to decode the messages. I remember one December 31 when I was about to receive twenty friends at home. He called me in the afternoon to ask me to bring him a case of Coke Zero. I made the meat pie and the turkey wait and got him his favorite drug (he was a long-time Cherry Coke fan).
Once at his place, by depositing the box in the kitchen, I saw out of the corner of my eye three other crates of Coke Zero at the foot of a cupboard. I understood… He who hated to hear about the holiday season wanted someone to be present. I took off my coat, sat down across from him and we chatted.
André had difficulty dealing with the world of feelings and emotions. On this side, we felt that several doors were closed. But sometimes he agreed to open them.
You have to know Brassard’s story to understand André’s. All his childhood, he believed that the couple watching over him were his biological parents. However, towards adolescence, he learned that it was in truth an uncle and an aunt.
Above all, he discovered that the “aunt” who showed him an astonishing affection was his biological mother. She took advantage of the moments when she was alone with him to cuddle him. Apart from that, these demonstrations were formally forbidden by the grandfather. “I quickly learned that people who wanted to love me had to hide to tell me,” he tells Wajdi Mouawad in the interview book (must read) I am the bad guy!
I’ve always thought that André Brassard had something of Jean Genet, an author he often brought to the stage. Like him, he burned the candle at both ends, he disobeyed, he fought demons and he faced justice. This last subject was never part of our conversations. He paid for those wrongdoings and moved on in the decades that followed.
Like Genet, André Brassard gleaned a vast and impressive culture by his own means when he was very young. This little guy from the Plateau stuffed himself with all the masters, all the thinkers.
Several great Quebec authors have crossed the life of André Brassard: Michel Tremblay, Michel Marc Bouchard and Normand Chaurette, in particular. Their dramaturgy was firmly rooted in someone who had mastered the art of dissecting a text, tracking down the meaning of the lines, questioning those that seemed sterile to him.
The man who elevated the profession of director to a higher rank in modern Quebec adored actors, particularly actresses. Hers were Rita Lafontaine, Andrée Lachapelle, Monique Mercure and a few others.
The departure of these actresses made her suffer a lot. At his place were photos of Denise Morelle, who died in atrocious conditions, and of his dear Rita. When he spoke of these women, it was always with infinite tenderness. About Monique Mercure, he said this extraordinary sentence to me one day: “This actress made me feel that I was a botanist. »
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, he wanted me to bring him a copy of my biography on Renée Claude, an artist he loved very much. I told him that I was afraid of contaminating him. He said to me: “If you only knew how I would be scared of dying.” I want to see you ! »
He was crying about dying, but he hung on. He continued to live. Despite the weakness, the pains, the humiliating decrease. But the disease finally got the better of him. Slowly, surrounded by people he loved, he left the stage on the garden side.
Dear André, I know that where you are, you have found “your actresses” and that you are already imagining for them a staging worthy of their immense talent. And yours.
Because your life was just that: shaping those of others.
On this day of first, I tell you shit!
PS I’ll send you little chocolates fancy, as you called them. Even if your doctor forbids you to eat it.