The Duceppe company had already hosted the satirical and biting universe of Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard three years ago. The adaptation of Royalhis second novel, succeeds that of the popular Wildlife Handbook. But with a daring formal treatment which promises to be very different from the previous show.
Remember that this 2016 work examines the culture of performance taken to the extreme through a cohort of law students from the University of Montreal. A very competitive environment which quickly plunges these aspiring lawyers into the merciless “internship race”: the need to achieve better results than others to secure a place in a prestigious firm.
Yet, Royal was born, in a way, from theater. Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard, who needs perspective to understand the origin of his texts, realized a few years ago that this story was linked to his time at theater school. “We were in a fairly intense competitive environment,” he recalls. Not really like the internship race, but it’s a bit the same dynamic: you collaborate with people with whom you are compared. And admitted at 16, dreaming of becoming an actor, I didn’t have much perspective. All of this, I think, has developed in me a sensitivity to these issues of performance, of stress, of what we are prepared to do to succeed. »
We associate the author of High demolition to portraits of specific environments. “But ultimately, I’m talking about myself!” » he notes with a laugh. And if the worlds he depicts are “very useful for telling a good story, the core is the question of money, power, capitalism”.
The prolific creator is a high achiever himself. He doesn’t deny it. “I come from a family of very sporty people,overachievers. It sure obsesses me. ” For him, Royal was not a complete condemnation. “It’s not necessarily negative: there are people who do great things because they have this drive, he nuances. And we are all a little [affectés] by this culture. » It’s more about seeing how to live well with her.
While we talk a lot about performance anxiety, the novel illustrates “to what extent, when everything is calculated, counted with this in mind, it can drive you crazy. It can be very toxic.”
The story follows Arnaud’s downfall: this scion of a privileged background, foreign to difficulties, begins to adopt questionable behavior in order to succeed at all costs. The author of You are animal It poses a central question: “Under pressure, are we able to remain faithful to our moral scale? We see this often: we start with noble intentions. » And it is not a cliff that we tumble down suddenly, but a staircase that we descend slowly, with concessions.
Moving away from the novel, Baril Guérard’s stage adaptation was in “constant dialogue” with the staging, designed as a duo. Jean-Simon Traversy this time joined the choreographer Virginie Brunelle (Fables), because the show integrates an important bodily dimension.
“When we read Royal, there is no respite, we are always at the end of our breath — especially when the characters “monstrify themselves”, remarks Virginie Brunelle. I think the body made it possible to have this constant tension. » And the evocation of the race for the internship comes on stage through a demanding, energetic physical score, leading to exhaustion, which brings out “the truth, the human”, behind the performer.
“It’s crazy how form meets substance: our actors push themselves to the limit to give a good show and fight against fatigue, perhaps against their body’s desire to give up,” says the playwright.
Bursts
This theatrical co-staging constitutes a new experience for Virginie Brunelle, very grateful to have had this chance. “Of course, I don’t work with words, so I thought there were a lot of them! [rires] But there are great similarities with the processes in dance. »
It took time for the two directors to figure out how to integrate movement into the show, she says. “When we decided to remodulate the text that Jean-Philippe had proposed to us, to make it explode a little, it seems that it allowed me to see how the movement could participate even more in the narration of the story. And that’s a bit like how I work in dance: finding images that are sufficiently symbolic, strong in meaning, so that the spectator feels something, so that he understands how to link them with the text. It’s like living frescoes, at times, which take shape. »
And in Royal, which takes off from realism, certain choreographic compositions aim to provide access to the vulnerability of the protagonist. More metaphorical scenes where performers give substance to Arnaud’s anguish.
And if these paintings in which the body, rather than the word, carries the narration of the story work so well, it is thanks to the rather “baroque” treatment of the spectacle, believes Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard. “Very quickly, the [metteurs en scène] have established that it is a show where there are a multitude of codes, means of expression, and that we can quickly move on to another way of telling the story. Each of the acts has its own codes. »
Role race
The play also has the particularity of being performed exclusively by young graduates of theater schools. Of the 281 to be auditioned initially, Jean-Simon Traversy retained 80. Then, after a second audition, which allowed Virginie Brunelle and Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard to judge their ability to “move well”, ten were choose. A long selection process which looked a bit like the demanding internship race described in Royal… “They told us too: there is a lot of resonance between the story and our process to arrive at Duceppe’s scene! » reports the choreographer.
And Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard modified his adaptation according to the personality of the performers. “As soon as I knew the cast, I recreated the character around the actor for each of them. I find it easier to make the fiction emerge from the personality of my performers than the other way around. » The text contains addresses to the public, where the actors sometimes speak as themselves. The author really likes this transparency in the theater, which makes it easy to establish a link with the room. “I don’t want to pretend that there’s an extremely sealed fourth wall and make the audience believe that this is a character, and that you have to be attached to that from start to finish. And I was there a lot in rehearsals — almost all the time in the beginning. If a performer invented something, it might end up in the text. We play with that. »
The playwright also found it interesting to draw parallels between the personal experience of the actors and the play. To see, as in the story, the disparities that exist between these beginners, depending on their origin or their social class. “It is not true that someone from a wealthy family has equal opportunities to someone who took loans and scholarships to pay for their theater studies. For me, not having to have a job to pay the rent when leaving school allowed me to do self-managed shows that don’t pay…”
Virginie Brunelle praises the generosity of the members of the young cast. “They don’t make any judgment on the ideas that are proposed to them. And with movement, often, this is what I experienced with actors [plus expérimentés], who did not understand the intention of the gesture: “Why would I do that? What does it mean ?” They are always [prêts à] to try. It’s a really rich creative process. »