In 2014, the first artistic encounter between author Evelyne de la Chenelière and director Denis Marleau led to the magnificent Lights, lights, lights. This time, their new collaboration takes us to the side of the night.
With the fluctuations of the story, its patterns that repeat themselves differently, The night treatment resembles a musical composition. “It’s a bedroom,” describes Denis Marleau. That’s what really interested me from the start. I really like these shapes that link us to a certain musical idea of theatre. We are in variations. And what I also liked is that we are in the poem at the same time: a poetry that is both spatial, which makes landscapes shimmer — there is a lot of talk about landscape in the story —, and with circulating motifs. from one character to another. »
The creator sees it as a “virtuoso score, which must be played in constant modulation, with lots of surprises and twists. We don’t know where it’s going to go, that’s what’s interesting. It is a short piece of incredible density. I’ve rarely been confronted with that, because everything goes through language, but it’s in an infinite modulation and it also moves from one place to another. “It’s a sculpture of language, a writing full of finesse”, adds his accomplice Stéphanie Jasmin, who signs the scenography and the video. A score that will be carried by a high-calibre cast at Espace Go: Anne-Marie Cadieux, Henri Chassé, Lyndz Dantiste and Marie-Pier Labrecque.
By exploring the night, the work plays on uncertainty, because, in the dark, we are not sure of what we see, the forms are transformed. “We are almost always at the tipping point between day and night, never in total clarity, so in these areas of ambiguity between dog and wolf,” explains the co-artistic director of UBU. And this instability allows us to explore several avenues in the scenic approach. There is a lot of humor in the play and, at the same time, the deaf tragedy. »
This tragicomedy is based on a family meal, a situation that appears realistic at first, but which gives rise to several versions of the story. A wealthy couple take advantage of the splendid view of their property while having dinner, a landscape that is developing thanks to the work of the new gardener, Jérémie. While her daughter, Léna, who never ceases to flee this world but who always returns to it, finds in Jérémie an echo of the revolt and latent violence which rumbles within her.
It’s a bit as if Léna mentally projected this universe, adds Stéphanie Jasmin. And the plan she foments with Jeremy to get rid of the parental influence remains ambiguous, as to “knowing if all this is a projection that she is making. We will never know where the reality and the fantasy are in this proposal. But it allows a theatricality to arise, through which it is always a question of keeping the truth all the same. »
Speaking also during the meal to friends—guests whom we do not see—the two parents “put themselves into representation, or are placed in this representation by Léna, because that is how she perceives them: always in the facade, telling that they are good parents, that they do everything for her… So, there is a theater in the theater”, she concludes.
We will never know where the reality and the fantasy are in this proposal. But it allows a theatricality to arise, through which it is always a question of keeping the truth all the same.
In front of this dinner in a bourgeois environment, tinged with irony, one sometimes thinks irresistibly of Luis Buñuel. The duo say they have, in fact, thought a lot during the creative process of the famous director of the Discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.
Feeling of guilt
In The night treatment, it is the language that makes the universe. The word is powerful. “As Evelyn says [de la Chenelière], language directs images and reality, which travels between dream, fantasy and reality. The characters themselves unfold the images, the sensations, so they are inhabited reciters. But through language their contradictions, their ambiguities, their laughable side, sometimes, and their monstrous side are also revealed. »
Denis Marleau adds that the characters have the power to “fictionize” each other. “There is that in the piece: how, for example, the figure of Jérémie is almost completely a place of projection. Ex-convict, veteran, adopted son? The nature of this character outside the family remains totally uncertain until the end, the gardener borrowing multiple identities. “At the end of the day, it becomes the receptacle of all these fantasies, which are sometimes linked to the idea of repair and redemption, explains the director. To the possibility of getting out of the feeling of guilt that both parents feel, because they belong to a certain class of society, wealthy, with this limitless landscape in front of them. A heritage that becomes very heavy for their daughter, almost an obstacle to her understanding of the world. She wants to free herself from it, and in Jeremy she finds an ally, someone who helps her make her project a reality. »
Can we, therefore, extract from the play some avenues of interpretation touching on the responsibility of the ruling class in the face of the problems of inequity on the planet, or of one generation in relation to the following ones, it which “threw the youth into a rotten world”? “You can see a lot of meanings in it,” says Stéphanie Jasmin. The central axis [du texte], it’s a bit like how these people clear their consciences in order to be innocent, because they feel guilty. And in the West, we always have this friction between guilt — it’s so tragic, we’re going to make donations — and, at the same time, a kind of unconsciousness which allows us to say: in any case, it’s not not our fault. And to continue to make our suppers and eat good strawberries picked by workers [exploités]… But the subject is not approached frontally, rather by echoes, by small touches. It unfolds in an intimate way, from an intimate revolt, and can resonate in a much broader, generational, socio-economic, political way. »
And to give birth to this singular universe, it was very important “to start from reality, to propose a concrete place which could be ‘unrealized’, transformed scenically”, says Denis Marleau. The scenographer therefore wanted to give an incarnation to the piece. “It’s a recognizable place, but enough minimalist in its signs to be able to leave room for speech, so that the spectator’s imagination can enter into the stories without showing everything. I think that the challenge of these texts which give several perspectives is to manage to allow these ambiguities to hatch, these possibilities, without really deciding what is true or not. »