I have a videocassette of the play at home Call me Stéphane by Claude Meunier and Louis Saia, a tele-theater filmed in 1982 with the original cast, which I must have seen ten times so much it makes me laugh, on par with Neighbors, another flagship piece of the tandem. We see ordinary people trying their hand at the theater, in a course directed by a mediocre actor who takes himself for a master. Marc Messier played Jean-Guy, a guy much more interested in becoming the clone of Yvon Deschamps than in vaudeville.
This character recalled how Yvon Deschamps had become an undisputed star at the time, and Marc Messier himself acknowledges his debt to the most famous comedian in Quebec. “We were all in awe of Deschamps, Charlebois, Forestier and Mouffe in The Osstidcho, he recalls. I was 20 and it was like the Beatles. They smoked pot, they had long hair and spoke Quebec. There was a very strong surge of Quebec identity at that time and I was totally in it. I was studying at the theater school, we were working on Musset and Molière, and suddenly Michel Tremblay arrived, we saw people on stage that we could meet in the street. It was an exhilarating time. ”
“I say in this show that in the 1950s, there were only two egos in Quebec: Maurice Duplessis and Cardinal Léger. Quebeckers did not have confidence in themselves as a people, it came afterwards. When I was a child everything was tight, the Church dominated everything, everyone was heterosexual [rires], the monks and the priests were gods, and suddenly, the world went less and less to mass. It’s like it happened in a weekend! ”
We are seated at the restaurant Chez Lévesque and for an hour and a half, Marc Messier will try to explain to me what his first one-man-show in life, entitled Marc Messier alone… on stage! The idea arose from a little monologue in the play Nine by Mani Soleymanlou, who signs the staging of his show, written during the pandemic with the advice of Louis Saia, a great traveling companion in whom he has complete confidence.
It is about a man who discusses with his ego, who looks back on his career, the evolution of Quebec, who speaks of love and death, but Marc Messier himself considers that it is difficult to define this. spectacle. Is it ultimately a bit of the balance sheet of his life?
“There’s a bit of that,” he replies. Pierre Curzi came to see the show in progress, and he told me that it was like a biography played with self-mockery. I take my job seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously. ”
Marc Messier would have every reason to have an oversized ego. He has taken part in an impressive number of productions which have left a lasting mark on the Quebec imagination. Lance and count, André Forcier’s films, The Little Life, The Boys, and of course the indestructible piece Brew, which he played more than 3000 times with his friends Marcel Gauthier and Michel Côté. It’s hard to beat when, in this profession, you often touch great successes once or twice in a lifetime. Moreover, Marc Messier displays the calm of a man who has never had to wait too long for the phone to ring, and who has nothing more to prove.
With such a journey, has his ego already played tricks on him, finally? “It’s always tricky to talk about yourself, but I would say that I never really had an ego, through my education. What interests me in this profession is artistic creation and what happens on stage. Of course, success and fame is fun, and I live very well with that, but I don’t feel the need to talk about my private life in the media, because when things go badly, they are. there too. ”
And yet, at 74, he chose the solo adventure in a show he wrote himself, with the jitters that come with it. Why did he not take the path of the autobiographical book like many stars do today?
It strikes me as something very huge. I know how to be on stage, to write for what I’m going to say, but a book is another matter. I still found out that I could write with this show. What motivates me is doing business that I haven’t done.
Marc Messier
Even if he considers Brew like a wonderful period in his life, this period will have lasted 38 years, since it is the greatest success in the history of Quebec theater. And in a way Brew prevented him from exploring anything else on the stage, he was so occupied with this room. He chose projects for TV and cinema based on the busy schedules of the performances which were always sold out. Also, when the chapter Brew was definitively closed by mutual agreement with his colleagues, he did not hesitate to accept the lead role in The death of a salesman, staged by Serge Denoncourt at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in 2018, and received critical acclaim.
When you think about it, Marc Messier will have spent most of his life as a trio on the boards, hence the one-man-show today, perhaps, and he is happy with the first reactions. “People feel like they’re discovering me, I think. Because it seems that there are a lot of people who think that I did not have my CEGEP, because of the characters that I played who were not very educated! It is true that a cult replica such as “the hardness of the mind” can mark for a long time, and it is far from being the only one that we retain from its vast repertoire.
But Marc Messier may have reached a stage where he wants to explore his memory, marked by advances in Quebec. “There has been fighting. Fortunately, there was Bill 101, the unions, the Union des artistes, because otherwise there would have been appalling abuses. But it doesn’t seem to interest the world anymore. It’s a bit shocking when we fought for the French language to see that there are people who think it’s settled, but it’s not. We have the impression that this is never settled, and that we should never give up. ”
Marc Messier alone… on stage! is presented on November 23 and 24 and December 2 at the Théâtre Outremont and elsewhere in Quebec.
Consult the show dates