“It’s theater of ideas that is completely embodied. It is emotional, physical and active. It brews in your head and in your body at the same time. Director Édith Patenaude is full of praise forAn enemy of the peoplethe play by Henrik Ibsen with which she made her debut at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde.
Worn by Ève Landry, in the female role here of DD Stockman, the show is a co-production of the Théâtre du Trident. It is not yesterday that Patenaude authorizes herself to intervene on the gender of the characters of the classic works that she stages. “I have felt this need since I co-founded Les Écornifleuses, in Quebec City, in 2007. That Tomas Stockman become the husband of Dr.D Katrine Stockman, it’s not anecdotal, it’s a position, it’s political. If we want to continue to stage the pieces of the repertoire, which were written by and for men, we must correct the imbalance in terms of power and speech on our stages. In other words, you have to ignore the genres that are proposed by the author, systematically question that and choose what you want to do. This is how the characters of Billing, journalist, and Aslaksen, printer, were also feminized.
Although the text does not at all reflect its age, that is to say 140 years, Sarah Berthiaume has produced an adaptation that draws terrible, and sometimes also comical, parallels between Norway at the end of the 19thand century and the Quebec of today. “There are several places where the change of genre does not have much impact, she admits, but there are others where the lines resonate quite differently, where the character is lit in a very different way. . Then there are passages, I must admit, where I allowed myself, by choosing the terms, to deepen certain ideas, to accentuate certain traits. “Let’s add that the author has also taken the liberty of marrying Ibsen’s humor, first thanks to some very quirky expressions from Quebec, but also by slipping here and there a few clever allusions to the news.
A woman in turmoil
When Katrine Stockman, head doctor of the spa resort which makes her small coastal town in Norway prosperous, undertakes to make public the fact that an industrial tannery is polluting the source of medicinal waters and putting the health of spa guests in danger, she a crowd of violent opponents is discovered, starting with the mayor, his own brother. She says, “We have to remove the boys’ club, do you understand ? In all areas ! Finished, theestablishment ! The era of old croutons is over! A field of possibilities opens up to us! We must find new blood, my friends! We need young people in all positions of power! This is when Katrine becomes…the enemy of the people.
“Katrine isn’t perfect,” explains Berthiaume. She’s not a flawless heroine; it is steeped in contradictions and that is what makes it so interesting. She listens to herself speak. She pays very little attention to others. She bump everybody. A little egocentric, she tends to put herself at the center of all situations. Admittedly, she is courageous, she fights for the common good with idealism, being driven by a noble quest for justice, even if it means living in denial of reality, even if it means rejecting any strategic approach, but she quickly goes too far, she crosses the line. There comes a time when we can no longer follow his reasoning, which takes a worrying anti-democratic turn. »
According to Édith Patenaude, there is a precise moment, in the fourth act, when the public will have no choice but to emerge from its passivity. “At that moment, when we are on the side of this woman who has been resisting the manipulations of each other for an hour and a half, we realize that Katrine is certain that she has the truth. Her speech thus takes on a tangent that forces us to question ourselves, to change our opinion, to dissociate ourselves from her remarks, which is all the more difficult since we feel a great attachment to her. »
Political theater
Ibsen’s play, which many have discovered in the unbridled staging of the German Thomas Ostermeier at the Festival TransAmériques in 2013, responds to Édith Patenaude’s craze for turbulent political theatre. “I love it because there is action”, explains the one who does not lack experience in the matter after having mounted The absence of war by David Hare 1984 by George Orwell and Oslo by JT Rogers. “There are dealings, manipulations, associations and betrayals, but the dynamic between the characters is always very clear. »
Ibsen does not gloss over a single aspect of life in society. His fable explores the powers of the press, private enterprise, the state and the people. It depicts domination, inequality, corruption, exploitation and imbalance. It covers the environment, medicine, science and health, but also education, politics, religion, justice and the economy. “He was so ahead of his time, so avant-garde,” says Patenaude. Not only could the situation that is depicted in the play be happening in our time, but the subversive way in which he poses the problem is just as contemporary. His gaze on reality is an electric shock capable of provoking, even today, a flash of lucidity. »