As we meet him to discuss his most famous of his pieces, The Queens, on the verge of appearing at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) thirty years after its creation, Normand Chaurette spontaneously begins by telling us about his new foray into the novel, Symbiosis, which has just been published by Leméac editions. “This is the first part of a triptych,” explains the one who, more than thirty years later Scenes of children, returned to the romantic genre thanks to the pandemic. “I reinvented myself,” he laughs.
“Symbiosis,” says the 67-year-old author, “is the name of a group therapy for men in their early thirties. It is a workshop of personal growth where violence occupies an important place, a kind of trap that inevitably leads to death, a survival game that is similar to the television series The squid game. As participants are asked to recognize their “self-destructive instincts” in order to come to terms with themselves, murder occurs. Through the eyes of Alex, the narrator, a visual artist with disturbing works, the author describes a generation of men in search of identity.
Always together
One thing led to another, the discussion naturally slipped towards Shakespeare, with whom Normand Chaurette has maintained a dialogue as rich as it is constant since the end of the 1980s. Thus were born eleven translations, a film script, an opera libretto and A try, How to kill Shakespeare, in which we can read: “One is trying to kill the other, and both are still alive, still together … there must be some commonalities.” “
“Shakespeare is the father, recognizes Chaurette, but you have to know that it is because of Queens that my assiduous attendance at his work has begun. I was working on a translation of Richard III when the character of Queen Elizabeth (1437-1492) grabbed me. She is the one who loses everything: the power, the wealth, the title and the children. It was there that I decided to write my own play from the point of view of women. It took me three years to complete The Queens. To do this, the author extirpated the female characters from Richard III, drawn from the three parts ofHenry VI, without forgetting to delve into the vast and complex genealogies of the English crown.
On January 23, 1483, the wind and snow beat down tirelessly on London. While his brother Edward is dying, Richard tries by all means to get his hands on the crown. At the same time, in the corridors of the palace, six women collide their cruel and derisory destinies. Almost all coveting power, they methodically hate each other. “They are rivals, sometimes even monsters, but they are not only that, specifies Chaurette. They have roles to play that sometimes make them look like sociopaths. In search of meaning, they often suffer from the misfortune of being queen, but they are of great humanity, capable of love, friendship, sorority. “
Shakespeare is the father, but you have to know that it is because of Queens that my assiduous attendance at his work has begun. I was working on a translation of Richard III when the character of Queen Elizabeth (1437-1492) grabbed me. She is the one who loses everything: the power, the wealth, the title and the children. It was there that I decided to write my own play from the point of view of women.
Big girls
Since its creation by André Brassard in 1991, the piece has known an exceptional destiny in Canada, the United States and Europe. First Quebec play to have been staged by both the Comédie-Française and the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Queens was staged by Denis Marleau in 2005 at the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui.
These days, the co-artistic director of the Ubu company is extending his long and fruitful bond with Chaurette by working for the TNM on a new version of his show, carried by a royal cast: Céline Bonnier (Isabelle Warwick), Sophie Cadieux (Anne Warwick), Kathleen Fortin (Queen Elizabeth), Marie-Pier Labrecque (Anne Dexter), Sylvie Léonard (Duchess of York) and Monique Spaziani (Queen Marguerite).
“With its invented, chiseled language, its larger-than-life characters and its universal stakes, the play has as much resonance today as it did in 1991,” says Chaurette. The years have given me a lot of perspective on the text, so much so that I can now read or hear it with the illusion that it is not me who wrote it, as if the play had developed full autonomy. No doubt, queens are big girls, they are capable of fending for themselves. When I think about the fate of this piece, how lucky I am to see so many talented people dedicate themselves to it, I feel boundless recognition. “