Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what’s left? In its monthly series Should we reread…?Duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. He dreamed of being a great poet, would have liked to have the inspiration of a novelist, but it was as a playwright that Marcel Dubé (1930-2016) left his mark. On stage and on television, during the 1950s and 1960s, one could not find a better decipherer of the aspirations and heartbreaks of a society that did not yet dare to call itself “Québécois”.
Marcel Dubé’s career has been said to be deeply linked to the evolution of Radio-Canada, particularly during the inauguration of television in 1952, the year in which the writer, already a regular on radio dramas, would be among the first to be “played” on the small screen. With On the other side of the wallthe same year, he entered through the front door and inaugurated the tradition of tele-theaters, which would fade over the decades.
What is not lacking in irony is that in 1973, the state company will inaugurate its imposing house located then on Dorchester Boulevard, now René-Lévesque, in the heart of what was formerly called the Faubourg à m’lasse, in the shadow of the Jacques-Cartier bridge. Its construction will forever disfigure this working-class neighborhood, where Marcel Dubé grew up. However, the one who has multiplied the number of successful works, with 23 tele-theaters and two tele-novels (The sandy coast, From 9 to 5) between 1952 and 1972, was a shadow of himself at that time, fighting for his life.
A Dubé for everyone
His studies allowed him to discover Greek tragedy, and a modest job as an usher at the Gesù theater gave him the chance to see the play Tit-Coq (1948), by Gratien Gélinas, on numerous occasions. Marcel Dubé in some way infused a flavor that was both classical and popular into his theatrical work, describing, in three cycles, the revolt of youth (Area, A simple soldier), the dejection of the working world and that of white-collar workers (Florence, Lilac time), and finally the futility and hypocrisy of the upstarts of the Quiet Revolution (When the white geese returns, Balance sheet).
Long the favorite play of amateur theaters and school programs, Area (1953), a work intended for the stage, describes the hopes and miseries of a group of young smugglers whose illicit trade in American cigarettes will lead them to their downfall. Chive and Tarzan, the two protagonists resembling Romeo and Juliet, have marked the imagination as much by their loving fervor as by their implacable destiny.
The photographs of the creation which starred Monique Miller and Guy Godin in the main roles were taken by Jean Valade, a childhood friend of Marcel Dubé, who would subsequently become a director at Radio-Canada, signing famous children’s programs (Marie Quat’Poches, Picolo). His daughter, Claire Valade, collaborator at Panorama-cinema and to Sequences, remembers with emotion the bond that united his late father to the playwright. “Marcel Dubé is in a way part of the family, and he is very present in me,” notes the president of the Quebec Association of Cinema Critics. I manage my father’s estate, so I regularly receive requests to use photos from that era. »
Claire Valade also presented a film entitled Letter to Marcelunfortunately without sound and without credits – therefore impossible to authenticate. His friends at the time, including his father, but also Claude Jutra and Michel Brault, would have made this short film to boost the morale of the young playwright living in Paris during the cold winter of 1954. The film critic has also given the Marcel Dubé Fund of BAnQ a letter dated April 7, 1954 in which the playwright emphasizes to Jean Valade that this film constitutes the “greatest gift I have received in my life”.
Reading this correspondence demonstrates, if necessary, the heightened sensitivity of Marcel Dubé, similar to that of his characters, rebellious or disillusioned, cynical or idealistic, not very far from those of his favorite playwrights, including Arthur Miller and especially Anton Chekhov . Marcel Dubé saw in the latter “the inventor of modern theater”, inspired by his melancholy. Michel Vaïs, theater critic, associated with the review Game since its beginnings, has remained attached to some of Dubé’s first plays, emphasizing in passing the playwright’s great capacity for work (his literary heritage includes 300 works). “I have great affection for Areabut in my eyes, A simple soldier (1957) represents his clearest and most tragic play. It extends in a way Tit-Coqbecause it deals with war, and gave Gilles Pelletier one of his greatest roles with the character of Joseph Latour. »
The longevity of Beautiful Sundays
On the other hand, in his so-called bourgeois period – a term that irritated Dubé -, Beautiful Sundays is among his successes, according to Michel Vaïs. “In this piece, he describes what Jacques Parizeau would later call “Québec Inc.”. Dubé announced it in the 1960s, while writing an anti-federalist charge whose power I remember. » This tirade was expunged from Richard Martin’s film adaptation in 1974, where actor Yves Létourneau took over the role of Olivier that he had created on stage. In 1993, on the stages of the TNM, it will be the turn of Guy Nadon, under the direction of Lorraine Pintal, to brilliantly revive this powerful monologue.
The director Christian Lapointe, a creator keen on Marguerite Duras and Peter Handke who was not necessarily expected in the world of Marcel Dubé, also gave his vision of Beautiful Sundays. In 2018, at the La Chapelle theater, with 11 young graduates from the National Theater School (ENT), almost none of whom were the age of the characters, he took the word of someone around him who told him had suggested making a “mechanical saw” version of this piece. Before 2016, when he had sketched out a first production within the walls of the ENT, Lapointe recognized the importance of Dubé while maintaining a certain distance from him.
Dive in Beautiful Sundays was for him the opportunity “to put a generation on trial, the one before mine [le metteur en scène est né en 1978]while trying to be empathetic towards the social context in which she found herself. In any case, in my opinion, each play is a trial, and the spectators are as much jurors as accused.” Its actors played on an ice rink (“a sort of homage to Robert Gravel”), and somewhat mishandled Dubé’s language, a deliberate choice by Christian Lapointe. “This language has aged, and that is why the actors dubbed the filmed version in the last act, in order to evoke the origins of the work. »
The question of language continued to haunt Marcel Dubé from the thunderous arrival of the piece Sisters-in-lawby Michel Tremblay, in 1968. The joual did not interest the author of Medea (1973), and his fight against it often placed him at odds, even marginalized. Serge Bergeron, author of the biography Marcel Dubé. Write to be spoken (Leméac, 2023), recognizes the divide between the two authors, and attempts an explanation. “A lot of people I met said how he kept rewriting his plays, which made them difficult for the actors to perform. He was also steeped in his classical education, and perhaps also influenced by the demands of television. »
The biographer, also a scholar of the world of Michel Tremblay — he contributed to updating The world of Michel Tremblay. Dictionary of characters (Leméac, 2014) — discovered a Dubé he knew less about: the independentist, the defender of the French language, the committed man, having as much at heart the working conditions of Radio-Canada employees as those of theater people. “To some it may seem surprising, but he was a jack of all trades. He dreamed as much of poetry as of cinema, was very prolific, but sometimes completely paralyzed in front of the blank page. I was told that the director Paul Blouin locked him in a room to force him to finish a text! » Not to mention that he even signed comedies, including America dry (1986), a commercial failure that took years to repay.
Neither illness, nor financial setbacks, nor indifference will have completely got the better of Marcel Dubé and his work. During his lifetime, the expression “persist and sign” fit him like a glove, and he affirmed that his greatest victory in the face of adversity was this: “Continue writing in moments when nothing encouraged me to do so. »