Montreal Titi who learns in adolescence that his aunt is his mother, the latter forbidden tenderness towards the “child of sin”, André Brassard will be, his life and his career during, an insatiable. Fortunately for us, this dupe from birth was stung by the tsetse of the trestles and, on Saturday at five ) to learn as best they can to recite alexandrines by Hugo or Vigny, and to work on punctuation…
At eleven years old, the kid directs the first act of the Imaginary illness in a storage room of a school in Rosemont. At sixteen, he abandoned the classical course, but went to work on “classic scenes” with the actor Henri Norbert (the Jobidon of investigations). And then a dramatic turn of events, it is the case to say it, he enters one afternoon in a cinema on Sainte-Catherine Street where a film is being projected on Saint Thérèse of Ávila and he will notice a boy who , in the sparse room, laughs very loudly. He will go to him, it’s Michel Tremblay. The two lit boys could only catch fire together, but it won’t be in bed… their homosexualities being unsuitable, one hard (who will experience nights in the cell), the other not (who will proclaim himself moumoune).
The Brassard-Tremblay tandem (this “ dynamic duo which was to turn Quebec theater upside down) was born on Good Friday in 1964 under the aegis of a Spanish nun. Tremblay was then living his “fantastic” period (writing Tales for retarded drinkers), Brassard read the Greeks and led the life of a rascal. The meeting gave, at the beginning of 1965 to the Saltimbanques, in a pocket theater located at the corner of Bonsecours and Saint-Paul, a Black Mass where Brassard integrated texts by Poe and Jean Ray with some of his new friend; this poetic ceremonial marked the beginnings of the Contemporary Movement, its first troupe, the only one, because Brassard would live the rest of his life as an absolute man of the theater (more whole, more intense than him, it had never been seen) without being able to , like Stanislavski, Brecht, Vilar, Strehler, to live the dream of a troupe of one’s own that only the great cultural capitals can make possible.
At eighteen, with strained hope, he tackles with forty-nine actors (the actors were beginning to talk only about him) Trojans Euripides, standing out from the all-coming Ionesco, Obaldia and Weingarten that the avant-garde of the time (Apprentice-sorcerers, Acrobats) cherished. The critics noticed it in 1966, Jean Basile at the To have toMartial Dassylva at The PressYerri Kempf at Free City. A young wolf arrived from nowhere in the theatrical sheepfold where reigns the generation passed by Paris and which had not really returned…
We know the rest. Brassard will be the scenic midwife of the most important dramatic work in Quebec at the time, it began at the Rideau Vert in August 1968 in a kitchen setting, between fun and drama, coronations and joual, we will say that it is the voice of the rue du Plateau, of the people, it is an assembly of women where so-called sisters-in-law stick bonus stamps in notebooks that a “damn lucky” has won and who will obtain household appliances, but the most astonishing thing is this: the public—I was there, the first morning of Saturday, eighth row on the floor—laughed out loud at the tragic fate of the cursed lucky lady, because, as we could see, these false sisters-in-law, envious people, thieves, filled their bags with these Gold Star stamps…
Beyond Tremblay’s theater, into which he injected the visceral, heated the guts, reached the sublime of the anger and misery of this dramatis personae (Forever yours, your Marie-Lou at the Quat’sous in 1971 is the peak), Brassard persisted and also signed great shows while remaining faithful to his first desires when he read the Greeks, Shakespeare, Racine, discovering his affinities with Genet and the Torontonians John Herbert and Brad Fraser, gay and sulphurous authors, but also, with his vast, wide dramatic culture, he will sign a scenic marvel with the Godot of Beckett at the TNM, another with the Pericles of Shakespeare in Ottawa, trying out perverse gallantry with Marivaux, slow melancholy with Chekhov, putting off the day when he wanted to play the role of Alceste himself, the misanthrope played by Molière, never deciding to do so, until the fatal day of 1999 when his race stopped: the cardiovascular accident, the only obstacle that could put an end to the remarkable journey of this sensitive and gruff guru of rehearsal rooms, backstage, theaters.
He will have shaken everything, Brassard, this indomitable remained untamed, he shook the authors, the actors, the texts, the tinsel, the veils, the moths, the pots, he will have brought a crowd of actors and actresses from Quebec, of actresses above all, to give their characters the best of themselves, he fixing himself nowhere except in the creative intimacy of his actresses, leading them to exult full of souls on stage, these Rita Lafontaine, Denise Proulx, Janine Sutto, Hélène Loiselle, Denise Morelle, Amulette Garneau, Carmen Tremblay, Denise Filiatrault, so many others who, all of them, owe her for having blossomed into others than themselves…
I imagine his mischievous smile, his fingers scratching his beard, if he could only know that he died the same day as Angela Lansbury…