After six years away from the boards, Vincent-Guillaume Otis returns to the theater through the front door. The actor takes back the necklace with the piece The sonby French playwright Florian Zeller, in which he plays a father who tries to prevent his teenage son from plunging into the abyss.
At only 43 years old, Florian Zeller has achieved the feat of being consecrated both in France and in the English-speaking world for his family triptych, which also includes The father and The mother.
Often presented as the most played contemporary French playwright internationally, the one who is also a writer and screenwriter has made himself known on a larger scale thanks to the film The Father. This heartbreaking drama about the ravages of senility won him the Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2021. The main performer, Anthony Hopkins, won the best actor award.
The son also landed on the big screen this year in an adaptation starring Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern. The film recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival as well as at TIFF in Toronto. It will hit theaters with us in November. In both cases, intimate, even suffocating, and minimalist scenarios on the complexity of family relationships.
Far from the red carpets, it is at the Rideau Vert that the director René Richard Cyr chose to adapt the play created in 2018 in Paris.
“As soon as René Richard submitted the text to me, I was touched by this extremely fluid writing, says Vincent-Guillaume Otis, met when indoor rehearsals began. It is a modern play in its form, but also extremely tragic in its content. It is as if we had access to a modern tragedy. »
This tragedy is that of Nicolas (Émile Ouellette), a once happy teenager who sinks into an almost unfathomable malaise.
The relationship of intimacy and authority between a parent and his child often comes to muddy the waters. You are not necessarily the best person to solve your child’s problems.
The action begins when his mother, Anne (Sylvie De Morais-Nogueira), comes to announce to her ex-husband, Pierre (Vincent-Guillaume Otis), that their child has not attended school for three months. A shock for Pierre, a career lawyer who has distanced himself from his son since his divorce.
This commotion will be surpassed by an even greater shock: Nicolas wants to live with him, his new spouse Sofia (Stéphanie Arav) and their baby of a few months. Powerless to help their son despite all their efforts, Pierre and Anne slowly see the child they thought they knew slip away.
If the journey of his three children is (fortunately) far from resembling that of Nicolas, Vincent-Guillaume Otis still finds in the plot of the Son universal themes that animate all parents, especially those of his generation, the same as Zeller.
“People my age were often raised by a baby boomer dad who had no parenting role other than the provider and had to invent his own role. The character of Pierre is torn between this paternal education which tells him: “be efficient, act, kick your ass”, and the concerns of a time when we talk a lot about the psychology of the child, about sensitivity, of listening. »
The son also raises a disturbing question: despite all the affection they have for them, are parents always the best placed to help their children? As a doctor who tries to help Nicolas says, in some cases, love is not enough.
“The relationship of intimacy and authority between a parent and their child often comes to confuse the cards. We are not necessarily the best person to solve the problems of his child, “says the actor.
Back on the boards
Vincent-Guillaume Otis wanted an “intense piece close to a closed door” for his return to the theater as an actor (he directed Of mice and Men at Duceppe in 2018), after six years playing detective sergeant Patrick Bissonnette in the locomotive District 31.
It therefore took him little time to accept the proposal of RenéRichard Cyr, whom he describes as a “loving, brilliant and intelligent” director.
This is the fifth theatrical collaboration between the two men. The first dates back to 2005, when Cyr had mounted The Elephant’s Song at the Theater d’Aujourd’hui. Fresh out of the National Theater School of Canada, Vincent-Guillaume Otis found himself at a young age in a big role on a prestigious stage, a bit like his sidekick in The son, Emile Ouellette. At the time, he had found in his playing partner, Jean-François Pichette, a mentor.
“I remember his reassuring presence, without being paternalistic. He was the age I am today, but was still looking. I try to reproduce this relationship with Émile. But Émile knows the job better than I did at his age. He has the necessary instinct and confidence. It is a very beautiful complicity that was born between us. »
This pleasure of working within a troop is precisely part of the reasons which brought back the interpreter of Babine to the theater. We can also guess that he wanted a work rhythm different from that of television or cinema, which have occupied him extensively in recent years.
“With a daily life like District 31, I went to the extreme. It’s like an Ironman. I am extremely happy to have done District, but I needed to find myself and stop being all the time in efficiency and absolute performance. »
Despite a well-filled CV, the idea of going back on stage is still dizzying for someone who has more than 20 years of experience.
“It’s dizzying, doing theatre. It is an act of faith, of emotion. It is the art of the actor, more than cinema or television. Even though I’ve done it before, it’s like jumping into the void. But that’s why I wanted to come back to the theater above all else, to rediscover this state of uncertainty, imbalance, fragility. Because that’s where we create best. »