Chosen among some forty projects to be presented in formula 5 to 7 behind the scenes of the Duceppe theater, The Nicolas Rioux case brews very topical subjects. Erika Mathieu — winner of a Gémeaux award for her digital youth program Nomads — chose a very localized microcosm to embody these broad themes: social media drift, popular judgment, culture of banishment, extremism of discourse.
The play reproduces, with amusing attention to procedural detail, an “extraordinary” meeting of a small town’s city council, called because the playwright hired by the cultural center allegedly used cultural appropriation. But this debate surrounding a text that no one seems to have read in full soon turns out to be a trial of the absent author. A local child who returned home after playing a small role in a TV series in Montreal, this “capital of brew farts”…
Popular condemnation all over the place
In less than an hour, the text operates an effective succession of reversals, and surprising changes of tone. We are first treated to a very convivial introduction, the show directed by Patrick R. Lacharité taking very good advantage of the 5 to 7 context and the proximity between stage and room: the sandwiches offered at the snack are integrated in the story, and the actors address the spectators as if they were attending the council. Manon Lussier’s adviser and the very good-natured mayor camped by a credible François Trudel lend themselves to the game in particular.
Then the session degenerates — causing the narrative to drift away from realism. The play is obviously a satire of the hasty and excessive condemnations that are raging on social networks. The author pushes the demonstration to the bottom, depicting a group that gets carried away to demand insane punishments. Expressing these statements aloud, rather than in the virtual world, seems to further exacerbate their outrageous nature. A final reversal will see the mob find a more suitable enemy – thus justifying its aggressiveness? It’s still a bit ambiguous.
The Nicolas Rioux case eloquently illustrates that it is much easier to be virulent in the physical absence of the person concerned and that, often, the violence of the debates has little to do with the subject discussed, on which some have little information… We thus discovers a personal resentment or prejudices that underlie the emotional interventions of the characters played with conviction by Joëlle Paré-Beaulieu, Christophe Payeur and Alex Trahan. The observation of the piece may not be new, but its satirical charge carries.