In 2018, Gabrielle Chapdelaine won the Gratien-Gélinas prize for A day, a play with four characters whose form the jury hailed “as rigorous as it is playful” as well as the writing “alert, supple, sophisticated without seeming to be so”. Last summer, at the Quai des arts in Carleton-sur-Mer, Olivia Palacci finally brought the text to the stage. It is this show, co-produced by the Théâtre À tour de role and the company Tableau Noir, which is currently starring at the Quat’Sous.
The piece certainly tackles a daredevil subject, the malaise of young people today, but it does so by adopting such a singular form, a structure that is both linear and circular, systematic and yet fragmentary, a timed score and nevertheless delirious which radically distances us from the banality of the factual and realistic generational portrait. Oppressive, repetitive, anxiety-provoking, the organization of the work is so ingenious, so fertile that it fascinates perhaps even more than its subject.
Tomorrow is another day
Alfonso, Harris, Debs and Nico are four more or less young adults, or four aspects of one and the same person. We meet them in a living room sixties, colorfully dressed, rather retro, engaged in what seems to be a game, an endurance competition, perhaps also a reality show behind closed doors whose objective would be to survive the routine, the 24 long hours of ‘a day. They resist before our eyes the temptation to escape an alienating reality, to flee a depressing existence. We feel fear, even despair, in their homes, but strong aspirations remain, a belief in the saying “Tomorrow is another day”.
We talk a lot about cinema, the great classics of the Criterion collection, the sentimental setbacks of Hollywood stars, but also films that have marked us, but whose title still escapes us. We cover a host of subjects, but it is largely about food: the joys of the slow cooker, the benefits of a fruit smoothie and the comfort provided by ramen or a bowl of oatmeal, without forgetting the relationship to body image. and chronic constipation. That said, the real issue of the play is loneliness, isolation, the immense need for love and friendship felt by the characters embodied with aplomb by Nathalie Claude, Rose-Anne Déry, Renaud Lacelle- Bourdon and André-Luc Tessier.
Cruel without being devoid of tenderness, dark, but often funny, their exchanges captivate largely because they are based on a principle of narration and prescription. That is to say that the protagonists, using the second person singular, enjoin themselves to perform actions, challenge each other. Many times it involves answering the phone and improvising a conversation with his mother, his faithful friend or his boss. Possessing the right rhythm and the right tone, Olivia Palacci’s staging makes the form crystal clear, thereby delivering a vibrant tribute to the theater, and more particularly to its therapeutic nature, to its ability to intervene in our lives. as a mediation.