“Telling is a kind of duty. A way to honor, to mourn, to remember. A way of leading the fight of memory against forgetting. » This perfectly sums up Jonas Gardell’s approach. With Never wipe away tears without glovespublished in France in 2016, then in Quebec, by Alto, in 2018, the Swedish writer has certainly offered literature one of the most vibrant testimonies of the first years of the AIDS epidemic, a tragic story, made up of injustice and lies, but also revolt and solidarity.
Last March, under the banner of Trident, in Quebec, Alexandre Fecteau (director) and Véronique Côté (adaptation) brought Jonas Gardell’s novel to the stage. Presented right now at the Duceppe theater, the poignant three and a half hour show (including an intermission), performed by 12 actors and 4 musicians (a pianist, a cellist, a violinist and a violist), is part of a rich line of theatrical works depicting the intimate and collective issues of AIDS. Let us mention The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, Love! Valor! Compassion ! by Terrence McNally, Angels in America by Tony Kushner and The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez.
Requiem for a vanished generation
In the Stockholm of the early 1980s, while a terrible encounter between Eros and Thanatos takes place, seven gay men stick together. Rasmus (Olivier Arteau), who fled the countryside, and Benjamin (Maxime Beauregard-Martin), who fled the Jehovah’s Witnesses, are very much in love. The benevolent Seppo (Laurent Fecteau-Nadeau) is in a relationship with Lars-Ake (Israel Gamache), a painter. While the sensitive Reine (Samuel La Rochelle) is a journalist, Bengt (Gabriel Cloutier Tremblay) is studying to become an actor. At the head of this unusual collective, what we call a chosen family, there is Paul, a colorful, prodigiously free and devilishly endearing character that Maxime Robin embodies with irresistible panache.
“This story is a mausoleum of lovers. A requiem for a vanished generation, a requiem for each of the children we were. A tomb of images and words for our lost friends; taken away, but not forgotten. » It is Reine who pronounces these words. He is the first to die within the group, the first to speak from beyond the grave, the first to act as narrator in his underwear. This way of keeping the missing present is one of the many discoveries of this show which relies on exquisite musicality and heightened theatricality, which does not lack humor, but where the suffering is often palpable. Constantly reconfigured, the stage system imagined by Ariane Sauvé evokes the multiple locations, but also the incessant work of these beings morally and physically assailed by illness. Magnificently lit by Elliot Gaudreau, the plateau is a memorial where water occupies a crucial place.
Making the Quebec language heard, inviting the words of Daniel Lavoie and the unique timbre of Marie Carmen, Alexandre Fecteau creates a show that is both Swedish and Quebecois, both yesterday and today; a work of memory, certainly, but which is part of the present by recalling the courage it takes, even today, to turn our back on shame. “You would like us to be ashamed of existing,” Rasmus says to his father. You would like us to be ashamed of being who we are, of loving who we love, but no, it’s your shame, not ours. She doesn’t belong to us. We’ll give it back to you. We turn it around and make it our pride. »