Last week, at the TNM premiere of Michel Tremblay’s new creation, Dear Chekhov, an irruption in the room will have caused a stir. A group of young actors had come to read a manifesto before the performance, invited to step onto the stage by the director, Serge Denoncourt, who had seen them picketing outside. These voices suddenly called for a free theater, pointing to the TNM, in their eyes moribund, intended for the rich and outdated: “We affirm that the theater must free itself from corporatist conformity, from the influence of commercial partners, from the tutelage of interest groups”, they launched, calling for a political, popular and revolutionary art. Low blow in the fine parts. This theater had struggled like the others under the reign of COVID-19.
But, it’s fine to say, later, throughout the play Dear Chekhov, a tribute to the Russian master coupled with a work on the creative pangs of Michel Tremblay, I wondered if these troublemakers were in cahoots with the views guy. Wink of self-mockery partly from the TNM? Oh no! A wind of protest was well and truly invited to the theater in front of the scintillating fauna of a premiere, in exhortation to change everything. Which is always a good sign.
Still, their words seemed to echo the doubts expressed by the author of the sisters-in-law all along Dear Chekhov. The playwright questions the relevance of a consecrated writer in the face of the rise of millennials who approach art under other codes than their elders, sometimes in a brilliant way. Generational shifts declined in haunting, acute, highly personal themes. By the way, Tremblay’s opus is not outdated at all. Despite lengths at the beginning and certain characters that are too sketchy or quickly neglected, the whole is complex, touching, funny, current and Chekhovian from top to bottom.
The experience of old age constitutes a precious crucible. That of Tremblay has its roots in the Great Darkness. He re-enchanted his childhood on rue Fabre for so long. How the Plateau-Mont-Royal has changed since then! But the bearers of memory remain beacons in new nights threatening our times of rupture. The piece asks very relevant questions to artists already established before the digital revolution and the new social changes: should we remain faithful to our way of yesteryear, ape the youngest to stay in the game or turn off the light after a last round? of tearful track?
Withdrawn in his bubble, Gilles Renaud in Jean-Marc, alter ego of Michel Tremblay, writes scenes, which are played, crosses them out, has them taken over by the actors. Through his voice, the anxieties, the strokes of humor, the erasures of literary childbirth and the parallels between yesterday and today are woven. Through it too, the sensibility of the man of the theater becomes quivering. His painful relationship to critics is exposed raw. However, these have some merits. Moreover, it happens to them, as to writers, to experience doubts and regrets. Tremblay feels it, dodges it.
In Dear Chekhovthe members of a family devoted to the theater evolve in the shadow of their star sister
(Anne-Marie Cadieux) who comes to impose in the childhood home her new conquest, a young critic with a hard tooth. This one had skinned a play by the eldest of the clan (Henri Chassé), a playwright returned to silence while healing his wounds. Each sibling personifies the path they took after glory, trauma or failure. An allegorical figure adopts modernity, another clings to his vision of yesterday, a brother scratches his resentment, a sister cultivates an impossible passion. Silences speak, but all of cursing against each other, hostages of the past with an omnipresent diva mother. The family home becomes the cherry orchard that forged this clan, fragments of Tremblay’s psyche. Also that of the admired author.
I liked that everywhere there were allusions to plays by Chekhov, The Seagull to The cherry orchard passing through the Three sisters, Uncle Vanya and Platonov, dot the show, like the patterns of a jacquard. Anton Chekhov had given birth in his Russia in the nineteenthand century of imperfect heroes with their chimeras and their bad faith, revolutionizing dramaturgy, like Tremblay and his sisters-in-law in the Quebec of the 1960s. And like some millennials. All brothers in blood and meaning, in refracted mirrors of a humanity that gropes its way without ever finding it. Thus, the Greek actors declaiming Sophocles in the past on their cothurnes remain as modern as the repercussions of a thousand screens by the virtual hands that brandish them today.