While his adaptation of Twelfth Night, by Shakespeare, co-signed with Frédéric Bélanger, is on view at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Rébecca Déraspe sees her most recent text premiered at La Licorne in a staging by Maryse Lapierre. With The ICESa play for 7 characters which courageously questions the culture of rape, the 39-year-old author pursues her feminist approach with as much precision in the subject as density in the emotional charge.
This piece is probably the most ambitious since the author left the École Nationale in 2010. First by its subject: we approach without prevarication the ins and outs of rape, and more precisely the notion of consent sexuality, a principle which remains vague for many, even today, and which deserves that we toil individually and collectively to make it clearer. Then by its form: we skilfully intertwine stories and eras, dramas and families, voices and territories.
When she learns that her son is accused of rape, Noémie (Valérie Laroche) is completely in shock. “Not my son,” she repeats until she becomes dazed. Then the secret she had buried comes to light, the body’s memory awakens: “It’s the body you can’t lie to. It’s the body that you can’t tell, to which you can’t tell move on, go around the crater in the middle of the thorax. The body doesn’t work that way. The body is not silent for long. »
When Noémie writes to two teenage friends that she has not forgotten that they had sexually assaulted her 25 years earlier, Vincent (Christian Michaud) and Sébastien (Olivier Normand) leave Montreal for Bas-du-Fleuve . As the two men gradually recognize the actions they have committed, the ice of the past begins to melt, traumas resurface, lies crumble and truth triumphs.
Directed in a sober, but very effective way, allowing for our greatest happiness excellent actors from the metropolis and the Old Capital to cross swords, the show co-produced by La Manufacture and La Bordée does useful work by approaching with nuance and dynamism of burning social issues. Thanks to the characters embodied with admirable conviction by Anne Beaupré Moulounda, Daniel Gadouas, Marine Johnson (in Montreal, Repentigny and Rivière-du-Loup), Éléonore Loiselle (in Quebec City) and Debbie Lynch-White, it is a question of fault and empowerment, grief and depression, inequality and alcoholism, but also sisterhood and forgiveness.
It sometimes happens that the dialogues flirt with didacticism, that we feel the noble concern to represent all the avenues, all the currents of thought, or that the comedy, in certain crucial places, is too pronounced. But there is in the words of Rébecca Déraspe an irresistible rhythm, a striking poetry, a unique sensitivity and a communicative urgency. Imagine what the future holds for us.