After his successful adaptations of Salem Witches and D’enemy of the peopleSarah Berthiaume is inspired this time by Frankenstein. She freely reappropriates the canvas of the novel, but also draws from the life of its precursor creator. The singular Wollstonecraft (named after the mother of Mary Shelley, a feminist philosopher) explores the difficult relationship to the (pro)creation of a writer (Ève Pressault). Flayed by her feminist peers for her latest novel, she now refuses to write and is desperate to have a child. But Marie multiplies the miscarriages. One stormy evening, she places her frozen fetuses in a revolutionary 3D printer. A gesture that gives birth to a surprising result…
The piece presented at the Quat’Sous therefore updates the famous theme of creation which escapes its creator. And its plot manages, ingeniously, to exploit this vein in three characters. The mother facing this son, this Thing, as she calls him, who has grown monstrously fast. But also with her husband (Jean-Christophe Leblanc, who plays both male roles and gives the creature an appropriate strangeness), a poet who relies to compose on “verses” generated by an algorithm he created: he comes to wonder if artificial intelligence is not better at his art than him…
And there is perhaps also this monster that we have created as a human society: the consumer society which has produced a continent of plastic and which threatens our future. A subject approached through Marie’s best friend (dynamic Ariane Castellanos), an ex-actress recycled as a director at Tupperware. Through his presentations, sorts of infomercials coated in idealism, Berthiaume deliciously satirizes the ability of companies to recover a progressive social discourse in order to sell better.
The piece is therefore nourished by very topical themes. The author has set her story in a dystopian context just recognizable enough to disturb, with its disturbed climate and its hospital system in crisis, reduced here to dehumanizing telemedicine. In the subtext there is also a relevant reflection on art. How does an artist react to a creation that escapes her control, at a time when works are seen as likely to hurt, where, to paraphrase the text, it is not the intention of the author that counts, but the effect caused by the work?
Like Frankenstein’s creature, everything is under the banner of deliberate patching in Wollstonecraft, which mixes eras and registers, which clashes realistic dialogues and more poetic passages, epistolary scenes. The author of Nyotaimori loves forms transiting from realism to the imaginary. But this time, the piece takes a little time to find its rhythm, because of a certain banality, at the beginning, of the exchanges which install the situation. It was halfway through that the strange, hybrid object of Berthiaume seemed to me to find its voice, which gives the talented Ève Pressault a more interesting score to embody.
An atypical universe in the theater, not so easy to embody. Director Edith Patenaude achieves this with a minimum of technology, relying on lighting and the sound environment.