Invite Le Projet Bocal to create a show at Duceppe, while the extravagant trio has been flourishing since 2013 in the fertile, but modest, space of the Licorne — let’s mention The Jar Project (2013), Oh Lord (2014) and The show (2016) — it’s an artistic gesture that would have been inconceivable during the time of the previous director. So let’s start by saluting the refreshing audacity that David Laurin and Jean-Simon Traversy continue to demonstrate.
Without breaking with the tone of their past productions, but favoring burlesque over strangeness and a certain linearity in favor of the fragment, Sonia Cordeau, Simon Lacroix and Raphaëlle Lalande imagined for Duceppe’s large stage a “big piece of theatre” titled show time, a weapon of mass destruction when it comes to tackling the November gloom. Playing with the codes of representation, relying on a mise en abyme as ridiculous as it is enjoyable, the adventure in situ is derisory and bombastic, absurd and cathartic.
In order to express the anguish of a young company facing the most imposing stage of its career, the collective has somehow yielded to autobiographical temptation, of course by cheerfully forcing the line. With Éric Bernier, Jean-Marc Dalphond, Natacha Filiatrault, Dominique Leduc, Étienne Lou, Alexia Martel and Olivier Rousseau, the trio undertakes to expose the intricacies of creation, to unveil behind the scenes of a chaotic spectacle. One thinks of Anglo-Saxon plays which stage ” a play within a play “, as Noise Offor more recently The Play That Goes Wrong.
We are entitled, among other things, to an improvisation session without words, without movements and without outcome; to a shimmering musical comedy; to one rap battle particularly fierce; to a giant puppet wielding a fork; to a performance that pays vibrant homage to fluids; and a poignant documentary theater about a crucial subject: rocks. In this exercise of high derision, which severely tests the zygomatics of the spectators, everyone takes it for his cold, but it is probably Duceppe, with his “old American theater” and his questionable slogan, “Emotions in time real”, without forgetting “Les Fromages d’ici”, its sponsor, who is most skilfully mocked.
This play, to which the delirious troupe returns for an exquisite final number, is neither more nor less a parody of those which contributed to the fame of the house in the 1980s and 1990s. Imagine the theater of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller who would have undergone a genetic cross with The heart has its reasons. Kindly, the Bocal Project settles accounts with the conventions and practices of another era, rejects the dichotomy between art and entertainment, and advocates a renewal of which it is certainly an eloquent incarnation.