The audience laughs a lot in the theater. Even during the tragic scenes. With high notes during the first few. Could this be a catharsis to ward off the discomfort born from the ambiguities floating on the stage? Or the desire to mark one’s territory (I’m here! Let me be heard!)? Or, more generally, because, in a Quebec full of humor, any successful evening requires a lot of fun. We would then have to work hard for the outing to be worth the security fees, the travel between the orange cones, the price of the ticket, the time invested, the expected disappointments. Reductive, this imperative to have fun at all costs in front of the stage? A thousand times ! Long live the shows that invite us to lands of troubled poetry, where levels of meaning, humor and mourning intersect! We benefit from exploring these in silence, almost blindly. The unbridled laughter from the audience on serious flights grates on many ears.
So they were rushing to Quat’Sous during The last tape by Olivier Choinière. The hypnotic piece captures the physical decline and sublime flashes of lucidity of the unfortunate and clownish character of AB, aka the director André Brassard of recent years. It makes you smile, sometimes laugh, and above all makes you feel emotions that are often elusive and tell us: “Shh! »
The text is freely taken from The last band by Samuel Beckett, where a lonely person listening to recordings of his voice from yesteryear confronts his past. Olivier Choinière, familiar with Brassard, performed the piece wonderfully. Beckett would take his hat off to him: for his words and his subtle staging. For the fantastic lighting and sound effects. For the grace of the whole. For Violette Chauveau’s game, in incredible transformation.
No one other than this muse and friend of the Quebec theater man could have reproduced with such accuracy the grunts, the rants, the coronations, the facial expressions, the helplessness of the master builder confined to the wheelchair. She knew them by heart. Faced with the pile of cigarette butts, through the derailed voice, the clumsy gesture, the fallen body of this patched creature, we said to ourselves the other evening: it’s him! Risen from the dead a year after his departure! What a performance!
Thus, through an actress at the peak of her art masked and padded, André Brassard resurfaces in his cluttered lair of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, where one entered with a sinking heart. The last tape makes his dignity triumph over a daily life of decline.
He, the former accomplice and collaborator of Michel Tremblay, who put together the iconic Sisters-in-law in 1968 and so many cult plays, he, the lover of Racine, Genet and Euripides, the immense director of actors, for twenty years hostage to a treacherous body, bounces back on the stage in his miseries, in his greatness .
Laughing or not, some spectators found the first part of the show monotonous. Not me. The hero’s daily boredom constitutes the primary driving force of this poignant show, using repetitions like the chorus of a song, throwing us into a dance of nicotine and confessions. The parade of days on a screen with its words cut over the weeks creates a sort of trance. These chain-smoked cigarettes, these trips to the bathroom, this dropped cell phone, these hallucinations, these sounds from outside are transformed into sacred rituals. A giant cigarette becomes a triumphant cannon. More and more, the memories of intense creation, the regrets, the excesses of yesteryear and the lost loves are intertwined with his obscure old age. By listening and rewinding cassettes from the past where AB confided in his life, his unhappy childhood with a mother he believed to be his aunt, his vision of the art of yesterday and that of today, unfold. He rages, insults himself, exalts himself while recording his final testimony, sacred, sacred, sacred. The golden duo with Michel Tremblay, now T, then their quarrel takes shape without pressing. An angel passes. The half-broken man decodes before our eyes his secrets of staging, his theatrical passions, and recites verses of Racine, sometimes in memory, sometimes almost forgotten. A mysterious ball of cellophane sometimes thrown at his feet becomes, we understand, the symbol of his quest for perfection never achieved, but touched upon in the unbearable lightness and heaviness of being.
The play, on display until September 30, breaks up the laughter that bursts out too loudly, shaking the heart and the mind. Why go to the theater just to have a drink in the evening? It is never so great as when gliding among paradoxes before flying away on the wings of desire.