The coincidence was too strong: Evelyne de la Chenelière and Sébastien David both created a play freely inspired by a literary classic at the Denise-Pelletier theatre. So we brought the playwrights together to talk about it.
For Evelyne de la Chenelière, it is difficult to find the right word to describe her approach in Due sun. “I really don’t feel like it’s an adaptation. It’s as if a term is missing that would really designate what it is to create by knowingly being infused with a work, surviving it until it almost becomes a second skin. It is a work of creation, but which highlights why such a work is perennial: what its story is about does not need a context, a topicality to be significant. It is this survival that a new creation also celebrates by taking possession of it. »
It is a process that the author of Lights, lights, lights (2014), a piece derived from Virginia Woolf, has already touched. This time, in front of the invitation of the artistic director Claude Poissant to write from a work of repertoire, Albert Camus imposed himself as obvious. “It was very important for me, at the end of adolescence, to encounter this language, this way of speaking and thinking about the world. I used the story of the stranger like a doorway, but my approach was a kind of metabolization of all of Camus’ work, including his essays, to try to give shape to the shock wave that this thought created in me. I say thought, but what struck me about Camus, and that is his whole prodigy: yes, he reflects the world, but when he makes fiction of it, he has the art of bringing life to ideas. And that creates writing that is a very strong sensory experience. I think it lends itself so well to the theatre. »
The creator, who has read or re-read all of Camus, was not driven by the desire to deliver her interpretation of the fascinating 1942 novel, but rather by that of making a work “shimmer” which in any case “transcends any conclusion that one might be tempted to draw from it”.
In Because of the sunridden by her “precious” accomplice Florent Siaud, she mixes the story of the strangerwhere the enigmatic Meursault is condemned in Algiers for a murder without cause, and a “contemporary mirror”: Medi, a Montrealer of Algerian origin who blames himself for having ignored a call for help (we recognize a motive for The fall). The text thus addresses “a more diffuse violence than that of murder or colonialism: that of countries at peace, and indifference for each other”. Another “form of actualization”: Evelyne de la Chenelière makes the murdered Arab speak (who did not even have a name in Camus’s novel) and gave “a thought” to the female character, Marie, who appeared to her ” a bit inconsistent.
For the author, interweaving these eras and these protagonists on the set, “even if it is not the main theme of the play, it is also the encounter with a writing, a language, a thought that helps to understand each other then self. We can think that Medi encounters the story of Meursault, which illuminates his own feeling of guilt”. contact with literature.
Contemporary Midas
For Sébastien David, the starting point was a “carte blanche” from the Théâtre du Double signe, which suggested that he draw inspiration from the myth of Midas, this king who sees his wish granted that everything he touches turns into gold. It is by reading the version contained in Metamorphoses of Ovid that he found an image that launched him: a girl transformed into a golden statue. The author was inspired by the form deployed by this long Latin poem from Antiquity, where Ovid “weaves story on top of story. And I came across writings by the French philosopher Luc Ferry, saying that we cannot analyze these stories with our twenty centuries of Christianity. It was a completely different world. The myth of Midas, at the time, frightened people, because it was the living that was going away, it was almost apocalyptic. So I took that and created several female characters to explore in the lab.”
The author and director built the show by writing on the set, with directed improvisations, from canvas, with the performer Amélie Dallaire. Created at the Léonard St-Laurent theater in Sherbrooke, currently broadcast at Fred-Barry, A golden girl features four figures who have all undergone a surprising and radical metamorphosis. “As it was the pandemic, the world was changing before our eyes; I used that. »
There’s a golden girl, one in land raised from the dead, one in pixels, lost on the Internet, and a girl in duplicate, which multiplies. This last character, a playwright, is based on Amélie Dallaire. Moreover, strange convergence and coincidence “full of meaning” for David: the café chosen by de la Chenelière for the joint interview is precisely the one where the actress worked, in reality as in A golden girl…
The freedom to be another
Feeding on an author from the past highlights the fact that we are heirs, “that we are literally transformed when we frequent art and literature, says Evelyne de la Chenelière. And to recognize that, I find, gives strength, the feeling of belonging to something. It also makes you humble, because you can’t be a forerunner without first admitting that you are an heir! »
For Sébastien David, relying on a lasting work has proven to be reassuring. “Ovide was my good friend during the writing. Sometimes I took Metamorphoses, I arrived in a story and I stole something. I looted it, but politely,” he laughs. Stating that “vaguely inspired by” would be a more appropriate description for his play, the author recalls that Ovid himself “bring to light stories that were already in ancient mythology. It seems like it allowed me to go into elements of contemporary mythology. It allowed me, in fact, to be even more free. It was a formal and thematic anchor point”.
The playwright’s creative space is not limited by respect for the source of inspiration. “Obviously, there is a loving relationship to the author and to the work on which we anchor ourselves, says the author. There must be both an admiration and a release, almost a wrenching. Too much to do justice or tribute would become very cumbersome, and not very interesting. Me, I am really aware of having absorbed, drank the work of Camus, then of having forgotten it. »
“Evelyne, don’t you think that allows us to go somewhere else?” asks his colleague. your room Lights, lights, lightsit was great: it was you, but as with another [teinte]. A golden girl Doesn’t look like my other pieces at all. » The author of Napalm Sunday is not used to exploring magical realism. “Of course, I also relied a lot on what Amélie Dallaire was — a sensational actress. But I had the impression that Ovide allowed me to go elsewhere by borrowing a little from him. »
Ultimately, Sébastien David compares this approach to acting, an analogy that his co-interviewee approves: like the performer, the playwright who writes from an existing work is inspired by something to become different, while remaining himself. same.