[Critique] “The treatment of the night”: telling his nightmares

five years later useful lifea lush show by Marie Brassard, the words of Evelyne de la Chenelière resound once again between the walls of Espace Go. Oratorio for four voices conducted by Denis Marleau, The night treatment is a settling of family accounts, a tragedy of language where a disturbing strangeness reigns, which evokes at the same time Bernard-Marie Koltès, David Lynch, Martin Crimp, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Normand Chaurette.

The action takes place in the countryside, in the courtyard of a luxurious estate surrounded by vegetation carefully maintained by Jérémie (Lyndz Dantiste), a gardener on whom the others project their most visceral fears, their most tenacious prejudices, their deepest good feelings. At a large table, around a well-watered meal, Bernard (Henri Chassé) and Viviane (Anne-Marie Cadieux) receive friends who cannot be seen or heard, but to whom the couple expresses shamelessly its multiple privileges. Their daughter, Léna (Marie-Pier Labrecque), still on the run, hardly seems more balanced than her parents.

In this creaking theater where the word reigns, where the story, circular as one wishes, triumphs, where the night, far from bringing advice, is a source of permanent anguish, the truth is constantly fleeting. And if the truth resided precisely in a juxtaposition of inventions, a crossroads of possibilities? In this kaleidoscope, a skilful assemblage of repeated formulas, recurring motifs and reproduced actions, it is first and foremost a question of struggles, often violent conflicts which involve the rich and the poor, the privileged and the vulnerable, the landowners and workers, whites and blacks, but also parents and children, young and old…

Neurotic and narcoleptic, Viviane has terrible nightmares, bad dreams that do not even allow her to escape from a painful existence. “What’s the point of dreaming, if it’s like in life? she said, smiling so as not to cry. As for Bernard, a chronic insomniac, he frequently takes the wheel of his Mercedes to go for a ride in the middle of the night to the dangerous Pendulum bend. During this time, Léna and Jérémie imagine the worst, foment revenge, seize the reins of the story, so to speak, so as to be able to conclude: “We are the night. »

As far as the rhythm and the appetizer are concerned, the four actors are up to the task, there is no doubt about it, but sometimes, especially in the meal scenes, the comedy seems a bit forced. That said, in general, by resorting to subtle modulations in voice and gestures, Denis Marleau gives a carefully tuned show, sixty mysterious minutes that the designs of Stéphanie Jasmin (scenography and video), Marc Parent (lighting) and Philippe Brault (music) transform into a sensory experience. Between the shadows and the lights, the projected landscapes and the bodies that are embedded in them, the words and the notes that support them, a rich dialogue is established.

The night treatment

Text: Evelyne de la Chenelière. Director: Denis Marleau. A co-production of UBU creative company and Espace Go. At Espace Go until April 2.

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