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.
René Richard Cyr is unparalleled in vitality. A kind of dynamo of flesh and bone. In the fall, he is shooting an adaptation for the big screen of sisters-in-law by Michael Tremblay. “The film is not a copy of the musical performance, but a cinematographic creation, adapted from the play and the musical version. »
In the fall again, he will play the role of a Minister of Culture of composition in Willthe next film by Denys Arcand, in theaters on October 5.
What would he do if he was really Minister of Culture? He looks up at the ceiling. So many things, no doubt… Throughout the conversation, René Richard Cyr said he regretted in any case that the theater does not benefit from more important relays through the state television networks. “I wonder why we don’t show more theater on our airwaves. Pieces from the archives, there are so many! Are we so lacking in vision about ourselves not to rebroadcast them? It would cost nothing to do that, to at least make accessible what is already there. »
The theatre, basically, is just that: knowing someone else that I know, but without knowing him. It’s not more complicated… In life, in all our lives, we all pretend, together.
The mushroom town
Before becoming an actor, director and playwright, René Richard Cyr had become acquainted, through family memory, with the grasshopper fields of Jacques-Cartier, a fallow neighborhood on the South Shore in the region from Montreal. In this mushroom city, where everything grew as it saw fit, his parents had settled, at least for a while.
There, like several other families from working-class backgrounds, the Cyrs were looking for better living conditions. First of all, in their eyes, this meant living in a house whose main merit, ultimately, was to be theirs, however modest it might be.
Those who, to work, went to take the bus at the foot of the Jacques-Cartier bridge left their boots there in order to put on their beautiful shoes. It is not an image, assures me René Richard Cyr. “Imagine eighty pairs of boots sitting there all day on the edge of the bus stop, waiting for their owners to find them in the evening, on the way home…”
In Jacques-Cartier, the streets took a long time to be paved. Homes were often supplied with electricity by crafty little guys capable of braiding wires in order to quietly rob the public authorities. Even the big cats of organized crime were not watched too much, except by stray dogs who acted as police. Longueuil had not yet absorbed this city where a whole generation of revolutionaries—the Paul Roses, Francis Simards and other Pierre Vallières—had grown up waiting for a new sun to rise one day soon.
The permanent enchantment
His grandfather was called Louis Cyr. He was not the legendary strongman, the one capable of getting the better of even two powerful Percheron horses. In the family, the physical model leans more towards the side of the weakling. “My grandfather always introduced himself by saying: ‘Hello, I’m Louis Cyr, the weakest man in the world!’ »
There was, around this family circle, the permanent enchantment of a staging offered by the whole universe of ordinary people. On the screen of his telephone, René Richard Cyr shows me, in reduced formats, a series of old digitized photos. The colors faded. “Look, that’s me, sitting in front of my father’s restaurant, at the corner of rue des Érables and rue Ontario. There, I was in my world! I was listening. That’s what I was doing. I was listening. I had a bécik at six years old. And I was only able to do it when I was twelve, I think…”
The Cyr family was part of an emblematic popular district: the Faubourg à m’lasse. The family business, a vast showcase open to small neighborhood life, will become a larger-than-life stage. “This convenience store is my first theatre. The people who came to sit down, who spoke, I listened to them… My humanism, my desire to know the other, it comes from there. René Richard Cyr looks me straight in the eye. “The theatre, basically, is just that: knowing someone else that I know, but without knowing them. It is not more complicated…. In life, in all our lives, we all pretend, together. »
For René Richard Cyr, everything changed on a very specific date. “December 26, 1970!” I remember it perfectly as if it were yesterday: my father took us to see Thirteen at the table at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert. I wasn’t seated yet that I knew how much I belonged. »
In front of this piece by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon, the shock is total. He sees Yvette Brind’Amour, Denise Pelletier, Gaétan Labrèche, Léo Ilial, in a staging by Mercedes Palomino. “At the theatre, going in there, I knew that was what I wanted to do. To be on the side of the public or the stage? I didn’t know yet… But it was clear that it was all there for me. »
This family outing is all the more striking in that it is completely out of the ordinary. “At home, the sense of celebration, we did not have that. No way ! It was a very Catholic universe, like in many Quebec families. Each joy seemed to have to be paid hard… I was brought up with the idea that at home one is good, safe, while outside it is dangerous… I did not inherit at all the sense of abandonment, nor of the party! At the first of my shows, I would go straight home afterwards! And that would be fine. I think I’m a little flat! »
The essential really appears to him elsewhere than in the party. “I especially want to be understood! And to be, he finds himself at best with his nose plunged into his business, probing what he will be able to create, embody, revive. As a director, he has appeared in more than a hundred plays and dozens of shows.
After seeing Thirteen at the table, the very young René Richard Cyr was quick to write at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert. Could he receive the text of the play, with the intention of staging it at school with his friends? A few days later, to his great surprise, he received the coin in a large envelope and a note from Mr.me Palomino.
It was a teacher of Haitian origin, Frank Fouché, who sealed this budding passion. “He made us read Waiting for Godot by Beckett. It was fabulous. Then at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit, his teachers were called Claude Beausoleil, Monique LaRue, Robert Spickler…
However, René Richard Cyr was refused admission to the theater programs at the colleges of Sainte-Thérèse and Saint-Hyacinthe. “A member of the jury, a man from another era, told me that I spoke too much from my nose to do theatre, that I would have to have an operation. When I told this to my father, he said to me: “Well, you’ll have your nose operated on, and it’s all !” »
And René Richard Cyr to gather his courage in both hands and knock on the door of the National Theater School. “I had prepared an extract from the Berenice of Root. I still remember it. And in front of me, he unrolls these alexandrines…
“I didn’t weigh a hundred pounds, I think. But I had my mouth open and my ears wide open! There was work to be done as a director. So he does. Quite simply. “Louise Latraverse, at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous, had asked me to stage aAurora, the child martyr. “The room had known, at the beginning of the XXe century, a great success. “It looked dated, but the background was more than good! On condition, of course, of knowing how to enliven the whole with a new reading. Curious, René Richard Cyr plunges his nose into the archives. “I came across letters from the supposed stepmother. We understand, by reading it, that it is more complicated… ”
appetite
Its main quality? Yesterday as today, he realizes that it is first of all “appetite”. “All that really matters is to be curious. I got that from my mother, I think. I take all ! Everything interests me! »
His passions, he federates them to recompose them on stage. “A good director is a transmitter. He takes the world on board. It federates, around a meaning that it carries. And it happens, in this context, that he himself becomes a receiver. I listen… I see what the people I work with offer me. I wouldn’t do the same with Sylvie Drapeau or Maude Guérin. I am overprepared. But being prepared, for me, means being ready to change everything! It’s all about control and surrender, if I want complexity to live in front of me. »
Everything continues to interest him, to make him vibrate. He talks to me about his last readings, songs, opera, cinema… And our photographer arrives. It’s time for me to get off the stage.