Two women in gold, Newsroom, Gas Bar Blues : in recent years there have been countless plays adapted from well-known films. For Claude Poissant, artistic director of the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier (TDP), it is normal for theaters to draw from this source. “It’s an important repertoire, cinema. There are scenarios there, and sometimes even scenarios accompanied by staging, which have a lot of impact. I would also say that the intersection of all forms of art, over the past 30 years, has “changed the codes a little” and abolished borders. An artistic diversity which perhaps opened access to this repertoire of popular stories. “But you still have to find the right project. »
He himself has programmed four shows of this type at TDP since Fanny and Alexander, in 2019. The artistic director also thinks of the students who make up part of his audience. “If, sometimes, people say: “But everyone has seen this film”, I answer: “First of all it will not be the film, it will be the vision of a director from a script or from the entire work.” And many teenagers have not seen [voire] have never heard of some of these films. For them, it’s a discovery. Their entry into this work is often through the theater. Even The Society of Dead Poets, which was a cult film for so many parents. »
Poissant is considering another transposition project, but does not yet know if it will succeed. “The most complicated thing, sometimes, is having the rights. It’s always very complex, since a lot of people are involved in the film: co-authors, agents, directors… Who has the rights, and what is our freedom through that? »
A particularly difficult negotiation for The Plouffes, which is playing at the TDP, after a celebrated and award-winning creation at the Trident theater in 2020. “It was quite a story,” says the adapter, Isabelle Hubert. There would be a book to write about this. » Especially since the show takes its source from two works. The initial project was to adapt Roger Lemelin’s novel. Except that the famous, essential line from the eldest of this Quebec family (“There is no room, anywhere, for the Ovide Plouffes of the whole world”), only existed in the feature film directed by Gilles Carle . In the end, the production acquired the right to borrow 10% of the film.
One of the challenges is to achieve that the piece is truly theater and that we no longer feel so much like cinema.
Reading the 1948 classic, the author, who knew the film by heart, a fetish since her adolescence, was surprised to discover the 28-year-old Lemelin, fiery and “as virulent as today’s authors who criticize the current world. […] He is caustic, very severe with the society of his time. In the novel, we feel that the author is making fun of the characters. But when the film was made in 1981, with Lemelin’s participation, they were already memories. And suddenly, it becomes a nostalgic, tender work, full of love. The novel is a contemporary portrait, while the film is a period painting.”
Between the humanity of one and the social criticism of the other, the theatrical adaptation attempted “to bring out a little of both. And I think we succeeded.” In addition to tenderness, it is above all to nourish the female characters – “a bit of clichés” in the book – that Isabelle Hubert drew scenes from the film.
One of the main difficulties of this passage on the stage comes from the abundance of very populated scenes in The Plouffes. “It’s the film that brought together the most extras in the entire history of Quebec,” specifies the playwright. Having 14 performers on stage is huge in the theater, but it’s still very little for creating crowd scenes. “We have to reinvent a theatrical process for each of these scenes, to be creative. Sometimes, it’s in the staging that we solve the problem. Maryse Lapierre [la metteuse en scène] and I worked closely together. Sometimes I make a textual proposal. We are very much in the evocation, in the convention. »
Why does this story remain important? Whether in the form of a book, a radio novel or on the screens, this work will have “spent its life being successful”, notes Hubert. “The characters of Plouffe seek to rise, both concretely from the Lower Town to the Upper Town, as well as from their poverty towards the absolute, the better. And they are magnificent, funny and tragic at the same time. These characters are stronger than the discipline that presents them. »
For the rest of the world
Lorraine Côté, who is rising For the rest of the world at la Bordée, in Quebec, is already on its third flagship cinematographic work brought to the stage, after Rashomon And Citizen K. Why this choice ? ” Why not ? retorts this great film buff. These are fantastic works and people don’t see them. Everyone has heard of Citizen Kane, but no one saw it. For me, it’s giving [au public] the possibility of having access to them and seeing them differently, many people being put off by a black and white or silent film. » And she transposes them into an accessible, playful form with “a lot of poetry”: the theater of objects, therefore moving from a form which requires a “huge” budget to another which requires very little.
But unlike the previous two, For the rest of the world, the founding film of Quebec cinema, is a documentary that paints a portrait of the inhabitants of L’Isle-aux-Coudres in 1962. “It was our big challenge, and it required a completely different approach,” opines the director. scene. The show will include extracts from the NFB film and images that the team itself went to shoot on the island, to see “what happens next in the world”, 60 years later, and to interview islanders to find out “how they live now, what is their relationship with this film. Very humbly, we followed in the footsteps of Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault and Marcel Carrière.” Lorraine Côté believes that the approach of these pioneers of direct cinema was as “epic” as that of the fishermen, who we saw reviving their traditional “porpoise” (beluga) fishing, abandoned for 40 years. The play follows these two quests in parallel. “And what is interesting: one is the quest for roots, and the other that of novelty, of the future. »
The king dances
We will also see at TDP The king dances, a transposition undertaken by director Michel-Maxime Legault, for whom it is a favorite film. Responsible for adapting this feature film directed in 2000 by Belgian Gérard Corbiau, Emmanuelle Jimenez was fascinated by the theme of the “relationship between artists and political power” at play there. And by the relationships uniting a prestigious trio that we see “loving each other, tearing each other apart, undoing each other, remaking each other” at the 17th century courte century: Molière, the musician Jean-Baptiste Lully and Louis
The author, who was in her first transformation of the genre, cut several characters to concentrate on the three protagonists, but added one, a sort of alter ego who “helps to follow” the story. “One of the challenges is to ensure that the piece is truly theater and that it no longer feels so much like cinema. » A first version, very close to the film, lacked theatricality. “Basically, this leads us to define what is theatrical and what is less so. And it’s a lot in the rhythm and in the way the scenes flow together. »
Because, adds Emmanuelle Jimenez, “we can ask ourselves the question: if the film is good, what is the point of transposing it to the theater? My bet is that it ensures that the issues are magnified, presented in another way and that we give them a perhaps different importance than in the cinema. When watching a film, especially this one, we are dazzled by the visuals, by the splendor of the sets, the costumes. When we see the play, we will really get deeper into the heart of the issues.”