I didn’t even know that Balzac had written theatre. I learned it thanks to the young playwright Gabrielle Chapdelaine, who publishes, this season, the maker (Leméac, 2023, 112 pages), all-Quebec adaptation of a play by the French novelist written around 1840 and premiered in 1851, a year after the author’s death.
Balzac, therefore, did write a few plays – eight, more precisely, according to Professor Philippe Berthier, a specialist in the work – but it was generally without success. the maker would be, according to the critic Philippe Tesson, “the only play worthy of being retained in the theatrical production of the great novelist”.
Before diving into Chapdelaine’s adaptation, I read the original play. I discovered there with pleasure a Moliéresque Balzac, less comic than the master, but just as caustic in social criticism.
Mercadet, the central character of the play, is a ruined, desperate speculator, ready to do anything to get back in the saddle. He does not hesitate, as a last resort, to impose a marriage on his daughter, who is already in love with a sincere and courageous young man. The project fails, however, when the foreign and supposedly rich suitor is unmasked: broke too, he hoped to recover by marrying the daughter of a wealthy family.
In the end, believe it or not, all these beautiful people are waiting for a mysterious Godeau, gone to make his fortune in India, to get them out of trouble. The piece has rhythm, nerve and wonderfully illustrates the void on which modern finance is based.
Gabrielle Chapdelaine therefore had an excellent idea in pulling this work from oblivion to offer a contemporary adaptation. Showing at the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier at the start of the year, the play, directed by Alice Ronfard, garnered fairly good reviews. I did not see her. My comment therefore relates essentially to the text.
Mercadet, in Chapdelaine’s adaptation, is still a speculator, but his sleight of hand this time involves investment funds managed by a Ponzi scheme à la Norbourg. In doing so, he robbed 60 people around him.
At the beginning of the play, which takes place during the weekend of the F1 Grand Prix, a quintessential manifestation of ostentatious and specious wealth, he hides himself, with his wife and daughter, in a luxurious condo tower in the center of the city. city of Montreal because its creditors and the Autorité des marchés financiers are hot on its heels.
Like that of Balzac, Chapdelaine’s Mercadet is a pleasure seeker without remorse, who even takes pleasure in finding himself in his last financial entrenchments because it forces him to deploy his fraudulent inventiveness. “Why would I be ashamed? he replies to one of his employees who lectures him. I play the game of life. The goal is to make money, to generate growth. The system is made like that. I can’t change it. »
Contemptuous of the poor whose status testifies, according to him, to their “more… limited intellectual means”, cynical – he makes fun of the naivety of a rich old widow and a young talentless but ambitious student from HEC –, Mercadet therefore wants to marry his daughter to De La Brive, an alleged new rich versed in cryptocurrency.
Chapdelaine, who does not always resist easy irony, gives free rein to his critical verve by portraying this last character, a French-speaking Quebecer who claims to work in Silicon Valley, who rides an electric scooter and who speaks loudly, in English. , on the phone, to impress the gallery.
This other maker, also broken like a nail, admires Elon Musk, “the fucking genius of the century”, and intones all the clichés of new-fangled speculators by saying that bitcoin is democratic and decentralized. The guy is a freak in a clown’s outfit.
The women in the play have ambiguous attitudes. At Balzac, Julie, Mercadet’s daughter, is discreet and truly in love. At Chapdelaine, she appears as a video game enthusiast who likes her boyfriend accountant, but looks down on him. She says she hates everything her father and De La Brive embody, but her denunciations lack maturity.
Madame Mercadet, her mother, has more depth. She dabbles in a Botox shenanigans herself, but she donates her profits to the poor to numb her troubled conscience. When her accomplice tells her not to feel guilty because her money is the fruit of her efforts, she replies with a lesson in lucidity. “I haven’t won anything,” she said. My dad was rich and the rest of my money we got illegally together. That’s not bad, indeed, in many such cases.
I like this theater that makes you think while making you laugh. Going to see him is good. Read it too. We don’t do it enough.