“The fiftieth is the time or never to make informed choices,” says Joël Beddows, who left the helm of the French Theater in Toronto last June to regain total artistic freedom and reconnect with teaching (at the Department of Theater of the ‘University of Ottawa). The Franco-Ontarian director acknowledges that this new position will grant him greater mobility in particular: “I will be able to respond more spontaneously to offers that come from across Canada, or even elsewhere in the world, all without for I might as well stop playing one of my favorite roles: being a go-between for artists who would benefit from meeting each other. “
The fruit of three years of “frequentation” between the Théâtre français de Toronto and the Groupe de la Veillée – exchanges, laboratories and readings ardently desired by the outgoing artistic director, Carmen Jolin -, the show, which is on the point of taking the poster at the Prospero theater, is quite representative of the latitude that Joël Beddows allows himself when the time comes to create. Used to dissecting the “puzzles” of Michel Ouellette or Normand Chaurette, the director did not hesitate to measure himself against Winter solstice, a kaleidoscopic score that he gave to five performers from diverse artistic and cultural families.
“I took the time to find the right fit for each role,” the creator says enthusiastically. I was told that this team was almost unimaginable on a Montreal stage. I’m not sure why, but so much the better. The text is so unsettling, if the distribution also causes this effect, that suits me perfectly. “
The play by Roland Schimmelpfennig, the German playwright that Romanian director Theodor Cristian Popescu introduced to Montreal audiences in 2007, takes place on Christmas Eve. In the pretty living room of a middle-class couple, Albert (Benoît Mauffette) and Bettina (Catherine De Léan), already under high tension, “disruptive elements” accumulate.
First Corrina (Louise Naubert), Bettina’s mother, then Rudolph (Gregory Hlady), the exaggeratedly music-loving and unusually courteous man she has just met on the train, and finally Konrad (Marcelo Arroyo), a painter devoured by doubt. To add fuel to the fire, you can count on wine in abundance.
“They are good people, but above all good-hearted,” says Beddows. They live according to models, without really thinking, in a stability, in particular financial, an indecent comfort, an ease which desensitizes them. They are not at all equipped to recognize the danger of certain statements, the consequences they can have. They consider the past and the future as consecrated, immutable, reassuring objects, and not as what they are, that is to say problems to be solved, situations to be problematized. It seems to me essential to offer different readings of the past, to allow different interpretations of it, in particular by decolonizing it. These are themes that I deal with in most of my shows. “
Return from the right
Schimmelpfennig’s play evokes the world of Strindberg and that of Bergman, these family portraits riddled with cracks, ready to be shattered. Psychological drama, of course, but above all ideological; a cocktail of intimate and social perversions which stages in a particularly cruel way fantasies of domination, supremacy and subjugation.
“The text may well have been published in Germany in 2007,” says the director, “all its political issues are relevant here and now. The play tells very well how the return of the right is trivialized and oppression normalized. This is about anti-Semitism, but parallels can be drawn with the plight of all marginalized populations, with the decline of civilization in general. What the play stages, starting with the polarization and simplification of thought, strongly resembles what is happening in our society at this very moment. “
Although it has a rather conventional starting point, that it seems to adopt the codes of bourgeois drama, the work quickly takes crossroads, cheerfully jostling time and space, constantly shifting the word. and the gaze, knowingly blurring, to the point of dizziness, the border between dream and reality.
Although the text was published in Germany in 2007, all of its political issues are relevant here and now. The play tells very well how the return of the right is trivialized and oppression normalized.
“It’s a very demanding form,” admits Beddows. It is a work of lace, meticulousness, which requires as much rigor on the part of the whole team. Having said that, since I’ve been working there for four years, I’m starting to see more clearly. In fact, it is more likely than it seems. Just as we do on a daily basis, the characters in the play are the narrators of their own lives, they constantly name what they see, what they feel, what they perceive. “
Precious polyphony
This score, by which Beddows admits to being, so to speak, “haunted”, represents an incessant movement, a bubbling of reflections, questions, criticisms, debates, opinions and ideas, a perpetual change of perspective.
“This hubbub is our complexity,” says the director. Schimmelpfennig very skillfully manages to translate this magnificent entanglement, this magical polyphony, a specificity of the human species that must be preserved at all costs. I want the show to expose the audience to an essential beauty, to stir up shock. Art is political, more than ever, it is perhaps even our only bulwark against the simplification of the universe. “