He was conspicuously absent at the premiere of the opera adapted fromAlbertine in five stages by Michel Tremblay at the Rideau Vert last month. The beautiful music of Catherine Major will have resonated without the one who had once brought this emblematic piece to the world on the boards. Not with us, André Brassard. Present all the same. But for so long sick.
The man of the theater flew away at 76 after 160 productions and more than four decades of creation. With his talent, his rebellion, his rants, his demons, his artistic genius which marked the history of Quebec alongside Michel Tremblay. The one who had launched in 1968 at the Green Curtain the bomb in joual The sisters-in-lawsaid he was proud to have, with his old accomplice, given back his language and his dreams to the Quebec people: “We had the will to ennoble him, to dub him by showing that he was as interesting as bourgeois society Faubourg Saint-Germain,” he told me.
I had met him in 2016 in his Montreal apartment filled with books, cluttered and dilapidated in the East of Montreal. In 1999, a stroke had struck him down. Since that day, in a wheelchair, his mind on, but his carcass badly fitted, he was chomping at the bit. Impoverished, he received a boost from Michel Tremblay, beyond their estrangement of recent years never really patched up. After this stroke, apart from a few memorable stagings including that ofOh good days from Beckett to Espace Go, he had disappeared from the landscape, out of breath, bloated, on four wheels.
It was painful to see. Brassard had so much placed his revolutionary spirit on texts from the past, discovered the deep meaning of new creations and transmitted his humanity to the actors directed under his tact. This alchemist dissected pieces beyond their words, with a flair, an admirable creativity, measuring his twists to create the memorable event.
An illegitimate child born in Montreal in 1946, raised by a schoolteacher mother (who was in fact his aunt) under a Grande Noirceur who did not trifle with good morals, deprived of love, self-destructive, André Brassard was haunted by his wounds. But dragged to the theater from a tender age, he had been able to take diction lessons with the famous Madame Audet, before joining the troupe Les Saltimbanques as an actor, then embracing especially directing.
He and Tremblay had met and understood each other in their exalted twenties, armed with the same revolt against the establishments, propelled by the springboard of the crazy 60s and 70s which allowed them to express themselves. Brassard was going to stage all the plays of his favorite author except two, a few films too, including the flamboyant Once Upon a Time in the Eastin competition at Cannes in 1974.
Between them, they will have so long deified the damned Manon and the sacred Sandra, the Hosannas, the Marie-Lou, the Albertines and a whole teeming fauna, often female, climbed to the top by their tandem. Brassard loved directing Rita Lafontaine, his favorite performer, after her much-mourned death in 2016.
Nor will the public forget his great adaptations of Shakespeare, Beckett, Euripides, Genet, Claude Gauvreau, Michel Marc Bouchard, the late Normand Chaurette. To name only them. This monument of erudite, suspicious and complex theater saw itself as a free bird with ruffled feathers, legs in the dishes and heart in pieces.
Brassard was not the champion of slimming diets and his cocaine addiction played with his nerves for too long. His frequentation of adolescent prostitutes (he was condemned for embezzlement of a minor) alienated him from public sympathy, without however overpowering him. Each era is too reductive: in the past for having seen only the great director in him, today by reducing a man to his excesses alone. Brassard exhibited in interviews his customs of yesteryear, his depressions, his creative fury, before facing the storm raised by the most gratinated confidences.
Evidenced by a biography written by Guillaume Corbeil and prefaced by Jean Fugère at Libre Expression. As for the documentary by Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond Our summer with Andréhe revealed in 2018 in a striking way the universe of Brassard, who confided in the camera without restraint or modesty, but with the desire to send his too damaged body waltzing: “If death were a taxi, I would call her,” he said.
On the light side, he gave me these words of Descartes wisdom one day: “I’m proud not to have let my head get carried away by the flavor of the month. Each time we had a success, we said: next ! Anyway, the more you learn, the more you realize what you don’t know. »