At 80, Michel Tremblay adds a new stone to his theatrical edifice: Dear Chekhov. In this adaptation for the scene of the novel The heart on the shoulderpublished in 2019, the author dares to represent his doubts, of course, but it is much more a thanksgiving, an exercise in admiration, a declaration of love to the great Russian playwright, although of course, but also towards the actors and actresses, without forgetting those families whose members love each other without knowing how to tell each other.
“What was to come frightened me,” admits Jean-Marc, thealter ego de Tremblay, seated at his desk, garden side, just in front of the stage frame. What torments the character portrayed by Gilles Renaud: “Aging, the fear of being overwhelmed, awareness, the conviction of being overwhelmed, in fact, and of having to make a heartbreaking, humiliating decision. Revisiting a cathartic process of which he has the secret and on which, to tell the truth, all of his work is based, Tremblay explains himself by imagining a family of theater people whose rivalries and gossip , spectacular as they are, fail to conceal the strength of the bonds.
To embody this colorful clan, where the line is deliberately thin between the character and the person who interprets him, Serge Denoncourt chose his cast with care. First there are the three sisters: Claire (Anne-Marie Cadieux), Gisèle (Isabelle Vincent) and Marie (Maude Guérin), women with contrasting destinies. Then their brothers, Benoît (Henri Chassé), the playwright out of inspiration, and Benjamin (Hubert Proulx), who has the painful feeling of being invisible. And finally the spouses: that of Benoît, Laurent (Patrick Hivon), the “television star”, and that of Claire, Christian (Mikhail Ahooja), the theater critic who arouses the ire of each other.
Chekhovian melancholy
Gathered for Thanksgiving in the house of their childhood, a house suspended in time and space, the characters come and go in a melancholy that could not be more Chekhovian. Like the author who brings them to life before our eyes by pressing the keys on his keyboard, they express their fear of aging, their fear of being rejected, their terror of being replaced by younger ones. The process that allows the playwright on stage to move a line from one character to another, to comment on the situation as it unfolds, if it often makes people laugh, causes here and there, especially in the first hour, a few breaks that affect the rhythm of the whole.
The siblings are nostalgic for the time when their mother lived, when she would go up to the gallery to recite Racine, Lorca or Brecht. If they tear each other apart, rail against each other, make fun of each other as only show people know how to do, it’s to convey their anguish, but it’s also a way of expressing their attachment. In more intimate, more nuanced moments, staged with appreciable sobriety, we see the vulnerability of each other, the dramas that each and everyone carries.
Around the magnificent house designed by Guillaume Lord (decor) and Martin Labrecque (lighting), references to Chekhov’s work are legion, of course, but the motifs specific to Tremblay’s are almost as numerous. Certain scenes, like that of the sunset, allow us to reconnect with this sublime chorality of which the author has the secret. These are poignant moments of harmony, precious truces in what could be described as a great confrontation. Despite its acrimony, its malaise, its fear of change, its scorned desires and its buried dreams, the clan is so familiar to us, so sympathetic, so customary, so human that it is with regret that we leave it.