Last spring, four years after receiving his diploma from the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec in the midst of a pandemic, Vincent Paquette experienced what is commonly called a professional birth. In Royalthe adaptation of Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard’s novel by Virginie Brunelle and Jean-Simon Traversy at Duceppe, the actor played Arnaud, a law student consumed by ambition, a “king of the mountain” who left no one indifferent. “Because of the dancing, the intensity expected of me, the total commitment it required, this role was a real challenge,” admits the actor in his twenties. I must say that I am proud of what I accomplished in this show.
A year before shining in the metropolis, where he grew up, Vincent Paquette had appeared in Quebec, at the Périscope, in a production by the Théâtre Niveau Parking entitled The boy in the last rowa dark and captivating role that he is preparing to return to these days on the stage of La Licorne. “Claude is 17 years old,” explains the man who plays him. “He is a student about whom we know very little. He comes from a disadvantaged background. He lives alone with his sick father. He has a knack for mathematics, but above all a talent for writing, and a passion for the power that it gives him.” When Claude discovers that his work, in which he allows himself to tell the private life of a classmate’s bourgeois family, captivates his French teacher, he undertakes to seriously test the limits, both literary and ethical, of the exercise.
“This role is an immense gift,” explains the actor who shares the stage with Charles-Étienne Beaulne, Samuel Bouchard, Lorraine Côté, Hugues Frenette and Marie-Hélène Gendreau. “Claude is such a complex character,” adds the actor. “He plays on several levels at once. There are several versions of him in the play. He stages himself as well as he stages others. With each of the five protagonists, he acts in a different way, he chooses to show a facet of what he is. The audience is the only one who has the right to all of Claude’s incarnations. He is like a Russian doll, we constantly discover new layers, new secrets. That he evolves like this until the very end, for an actor, is fascinating.”
Written in 2000, translated into French in 2009, adapted here, in Quebec, by Maryse Warda, the play by the Spaniard Juan Mayorga, of which François Ozon made an excellent film in 2012 entitled In the houseallowed Marie-Josée Bastien and Christian Garon to win the Best Direction Award, awarded by the Quebec Association of Theatre Critics. “The plot skillfully oscillates between comedy and suspense,” explains Vincent Paquette. It’s mysterious and distressing — we think of Funny Games, by Michael Haneke, and to Joker, by Todd Phillips — it’s very rich, there’s not a single word too many, but it’s also very meta, in the sense that it’s a fiction that addresses the power of fiction, it’s theater that questions the role of theater.”
You will have understood that the piece, which also recalls TheoremPasolini’s film, raises many more questions than it answers. According to Paquette, the staging, the movement of the bodies, their location in space, all contribute to the readability of the different registers: “Thanks, in particular, to the scenography of Marie-Renée Bourget Harvey and the lighting of Denis Guérette, which evoke a contemporary art installation, we can decode where the characters are, in what place, in whose vision, at what level of the story.”
An author’s perspective
If Vincent Paquette identifies to this extent with the young man he plays in The boy in the last rowis that he too cannot help but cast an author’s eye on the world around him: “Imagining dialogues, inventing stories and characters, I’ve been doing that since childhood. When I entered the Conservatoire, it quickly became clear that I was going to put as much energy into writing as into acting.”
The creator does not hide the fact that he has a natural affinity with what is done at Duceppe and La Licorne: “I love the kind of dramaturgy that we choose to produce or present in these two places. I have nothing against classical theatre, but I feel more challenged by contemporary realistic theatre, whether American, British or Quebecois. When I discovered the plays of Fabien Cloutier and Steve Gagnon, I had the feeling of recognizing something. It resembles my world: I write theatre connected to reality, which uses dark, even absurd, humour to address current issues. I speak to as many people as possible, but with the aim of shaking things up, sparking debate and creating fertile unease.”
For five years, Paquette has been working on two pieces: Methadone Bertranda text which “humorously deconstructs the taboos surrounding depression and solitude” (a public reading was held last May at La Licorne, under the direction of Philippe Lambert) and Carolinea documentary play that “paints an intimate portrait of the reality of people with disabilities in Quebec” (a laboratory was directed last June by Alexandre Fecteau on the occasion of the Carrefour international de théâtre). Like the author himself, we hope to see these two plays included in a theater’s programming as soon as possible.