Taking the pretext of new appointments to the Order of Arts and Letters of Quebec, The duty invites you into the imagination of artists whose exemplary work promotes culture.
Novelist, playwright, director, Larry Tremblay is one of the major feathers of Quebec literature. The language of Larry Tremblay, lively and inventive, based partly on reality and partly on the stars, has imposed itself for years, both in the romantic and theatrical universe, as a kind of quiet force. and unavoidable.
“The pandemic has delayed a number of projects, so everything this year seems to be happening at the same time,” explains Larry Tremblay at the start of our interview. “Actually, my cadence doesn’t change that much. I’m pretty regular. About every two years, I publish a new book. However, after thirty-five years of work, the works now live on their own. They come to light, through no fault of my own, in various ways. There are covers, adaptations… I attend a few rehearsals of pieces that are replayed, such as the Abraham Lincoln goes to the theater just presented by the TNM [Théâtre du Nouveau Monde]. I look at the entry into the room… I sometimes give an opinion. But the work required is not the same work as that of creation. »
As of May 18, Usine C presents End Table of Love, a theatrical adaptation of his novel freely inspired by the tumultuous relationship of the painter Francis Bacon with his lover, George Dyer, a burly drug-addicted thug. The novel, published in 2021, navigates between dawn and dusk of this tortuous and tortured, excessive and sickly relationship.
The orange grove, a best-selling novel published in 2013, continues to float as if it had wings. At a time when humanity has its nose plunged more than ever into the scents of war, this story appears to be deeply topical. Producer Roger Frappier will make a film out of it, thanks to the work of Murad Abu Eisheh, a 31-year-old Jordanian director. Murad Abu Eisheh is based in Stuttgart, Germany. He stood out for his luminous inventiveness.
“He’s the one writing the screenplay. We spent a week together. He had never been to Montreal, explains Larry Tremblay. In front of the cinema, I learned to detach myself, to let things fall into place, on the side of the force of the images. The language of cinema is not his. His universe, he pleads, gravitates quite differently. ” I am a writer. I hear what I write, what I see. As an actor, I developed a very theatrical visual. The cinema works differently… So I trust. If I were a young person, I would doubtless have ideas, but I don’t worry anymore! »
The Clockwork of Writing
Many lives revolve around the deaths of The orange grove. In 2016, this award-winning novel was adapted for the theatre, in a staging by Claude Poissant, as well as for the opera. Soon, the book will be recomposed in the form of a comic strip.
The excitement around Larry Tremblay is undeniable. And this year more than ever perhaps. But the writer does not lose the course. He says he continues to write, at all costs, installed in the fine mechanics that presides over his days. It is quite certain that keeping the movement of this very sensitive clockwork that is writing ultimately counts more than anything.
The grace of a writing fallen from the sky is a rare affair with him, he explains with a slight smile. ” I write. I’m working. Writing is a discipline. I write systematically. Every morning. Whether I’m traveling or not. The first successful drafts in my life are rare, very rare. There are a few exceptions. THE Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, it’s practically a first draft. I have notebooks to prove it! It’s great when you carry a piece within you, without knowing it, and you just have to write it… But that’s extremely rare. Otherwise, it’s work, work, work. So every morning, I write…”
These days, Larry Tremblay has just finished a collection of five short stories. “I don’t have the title yet, but the book comes out in October. At the same time, he is busy writing a short essay devoted to the contemporary writer. “There is, these days, the question of censorship, self-censorship. There is what I call the shrinking of the imagination in the face of the overvaluation of lived experience. Me, I am an imaginary writer. I need to imagine. But it now seems that society forces artists, in order to create, to turn to themselves rather than to others. It’s the me, the I, the individual, his own community, his skin color… We’re in there. We consume ourselves. I’m thinking about it… I’m trying to conceptualize all of this a bit, in a rather playful way, in my own way. »
In any case, the legitimacy of the creator seems to him to have been reduced. “We no longer have the legitimacy to write about certain others. Now, for me, theater is otherness in its purest form. The theater is the other! I am restricted, by certain characters, because I could be accused of cultural appropriation. It bothers me. For now, I can still get the female characters talking. But I’m a man… Maybe one day people will find that I’m exaggerating? Finally, I push these questions to the extreme. In 1992, I created a piece, anatomy lesson. I had a woman talk for an hour and a half. She was talking about her husband. Hélène Loiselle created the role. This play would not pass, I believe, if I wrote it today. »
This question of the artist’s legitimacy torments Larry Tremblay. “In my plays, in my books, I created little planets. They are new, every time. My universe is not the world of a neighborhood, that of Michel Tremblay for example. It’s always something else that I recompose. But does the time we live in still allow me to create other worlds? »
The fjord of the world
Larry Tremblay’s relationship to the world has been largely conditioned by a long-standing passion for India and its cultures. In the 1970s, a pillar of a young theater group, he found himself invited to India to play in the theater in this country that was now the most populous in the world. The shock is huge. Kathakali, this form of dance theater, embraced him. “I went through another culture to see mine better. India allowed him a sort of freedom of gaze in relation to his own country, to his origins. “That’s how I saw that the Saguenay was beautiful, prodigiously beautiful. The Saguenay Fjord is one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. »
India, Larry Tremblay has stayed there repeatedly. “With the pandemic, I had to stop, but as The orange grove coming out in Tamil soon, it could be an incentive to go back there again soon…” Books have always made him travel.
“My father was a worker. Books didn’t have a lot of room in my house. And I was just a reader! I read nonstop. First I read Tintin, Maurice Leblanc, Bob Morane, all sorts of things. »
His mother will agree to subscribe him to a kind of book club. Classics arrive at the house, one after the other: George Sand, Racine, Nodier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand… “I could devour a book or two every day. I kept those books. They counted a lot. I especially remember what I hadn’t understood…”