Ten years that the Theater of the Future makes us laugh with intelligence, in a frank and liberating way, by giving pride of place to the absurd, but also to social criticism, and, of course, to music. Since Clotaire Rapaille, rock operaa spectacular birth of the company, Olivier Morin, Guillaume Tremblay and Navet Confit created The President’s Assassination, Epic North, The Perfect Wave, The Secrets of Truth and The clone is sad. No doubt, the first decade of our favorite futurists is already memorable.
In May 2021, “during the darkest hours of the pandemic”, the Théâtre du Futur did not hesitate to move its know-how and its sweet madness on the Internet by offering The wrath of the meek, a saga told from a map of twenty cities littered with video capsules that last from 1 to 40 minutes, an adventure that of course evokes online games, but also the famous books of which you are the hero . These days, the company is presenting at the Stables the stage adaptation of this virtual experience, a “luminous futuristic legend” entitled The big darkness.
Withdrawal
In the polarized world before us, a barely distorted version of the one we live in, the disappearance of bananas is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Citizens then begin to express with great violence their disgust at living in society, their anger at having to deal with people who, oh misfortune, do not think like them. Faced with such anarchy, a period of great darkness where civilization is falling apart, many individuals choose to isolate themselves among similar people, to found rural communities where “everyone thinks the same”. Any resemblance to our time would be the purest fruit of chance…
Led by Navet Confit, Myriam Fournier, Olivier Morin and Guillaume Tremblay, the 80-minute road trip, which takes us from village to village, from Saint-Ludique-des-Blés-d’Inde to Wokesbury via Graine B, starts on the hats of wheels. Although it is a real signature for the collective, the multiplicity of cultural, social, sporting and political references is impressive. The performance is a firework of accents, eras, territories, rhythms and works, not to mention countless puns. We slide without hesitation and for our greatest pleasure from the Middle Ages to the 1990s, from horror cinema classics to TV series Scoopfrom rurality to wokism, from Kermit the Frog to Jeff Bezos.
Unfortunately, when you arrive at L’Étape, the famous stopover located on Route 175 between Quebec and Saguenay, the show bumps, slows down, then gets bogged down. We then begin to miss the light to which the Théâtre du Futur has accustomed us, this finesse in the spirit, this originality in the tone, this vigor in the execution. Has our dark era come to the end of the frank bonhomie of the collective, its gentle subversion, its resilient creativity? To this question, we refuse to answer in the affirmative. That is why we will be faithful to the next appointment.