In Guillaume Corbeil’s new text, a room with drawers, a character bearing his name leaves for Los Angeles, where he claims to work for a Montreal newspaper which he renames, for the sake of understanding, The Duty. Have we gone to the other side of the mirror? so asks the representative of your favorite daily when she meets the playwright in reality. “I was looking forward to this moment,” he laughs. It’s the end of the loop: I pass myself off as a journalist from Le Devoir to finally be interviewed by a real one. »
Pacific Palisades comes from a news item. In 2015, on the death of Jeffrey Alan Lash, who had persuaded those around him that he was an extraterrestrial secret agent, we discovered that he was hiding a real arsenal and a hoard of unexplained provenance. As a counterpoint, there’s another real-life story: that of terminally ill Star Wars fan Daniel Fleetwood, for whom the internet arranged for him to see The Force Awakens before its release. “For me, it’s a bit like two sides of the same coin: on the one hand, we have someone who uses our need for fiction to destroy humans and on the other, a person whose desire to fiction has kept alive. We are all thirsty to escape from our lives, from ourselves, to get out of reality to succeed in living there. And there are some that fall into the hands of sorcerers, and others that find meaning. »
Why are our identities and our lives no longer enough for us? “It is certain that the world of the screen has something to do with it, calculates the author of Five faces for Camille Brunel. We are constantly in contact with beings whose lives are extraordinary, as much in fiction as in advertisements or on social networks. I think if we take so many pictures, it’s [pour] to be oneself a being of the screen, therefore luminous, like religious icons, and to become a character. And I imagine that reality is then doomed to seem like a long sequence shot. (laughs) We were told about the promise of something bigger. »
Since it speaks of our need to escape reality, it seemed funny to me to put the zero degree of my life there: me.
The “complosphere” of course took hold of Lash’s story. “And that created rumours: they are hiding things from us…” Written before COVID-19, the play found a strong resonance with the pandemic, where conspiracy theorists abounded. “Conspiracy thinking is a bit, in a way, a fiction in which we take refuge. A world where there are good guys and bad guys. And people drank from it, I have the impression, because it was like another reality and it made them feel good. »
nesting dolls
In his thriller, Guillaume Corbeil creates, with self-mockery, a fictional double of himself. “Since it speaks of our need to escape reality, it seemed funny to me to put the degree zero of my life there: me. So I got into it, like a game.” Mixing true and false, this play, which is initially intended to be “a eulogy to fiction”, plays with the codes of very fashionable documentary theatre.
The protagonist of Pacific Palisades will investigate the mysterious storyteller in Hollywood, “the place of fictions of the extraordinary, but also of the extraordinary shoddy”, where, borrowing other identities himself, he meets several people with rubbed shoulders with Lash. The text interweaves stories within the story like a playful series of “nesting dolls”.
And very early on in the process, the director Florent Siaud, who greatly nurtured and accompanied the author in the writing, had the idea of entrusting this solo piece to… Evelyne de la Chenelière. “That’s where the whole side of wanting to be someone else really came into focus,” Corbeil reports. And it’s obvious from the start of the show, with the actress saying: “good evening, my name is Guillaume Corbeil”… He praises the excellence of the performer. “She never plays the masculine. On the contrary, even, she does it a bit feminine, and there is a strange discrepancy between what she says and what she does. In the performance, she also transforms to embody other characters. At a time that is steeped in “experienced facts, testimonies”, the author believes that this discrepancy immediately creates theatre. “It requires fiction. »
And the narration of stories is of increasing interest to the playwright, who, without wanting to criticize his colleagues, considers that “a lot of manifestos and documentaries” are made in the theatre. He himself has also been asked in recent years to write for the screen, notably having to adapt the novel The American Bride, by Éric Dupont, for a miniseries by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. And during the recent Festival du nouveau cinema, a short film was launched, Standardized Patient Utilization Program, which he co-wrote again with director Yan Giroux, his partner on the award-winning film. To all those who don’t read me.
Due to the pandemic postponement at the Center du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, the production of Pacific Palisades first premiered at the Théâtre Paris-Villette last year. In April 2020, Guillaume Corbeil was initially supposed to experience what he calls with derisive humor “the most extraordinary moment”. The day after the last performance in Montreal, the team was to leave to give these 20 shows in Paris, which would have been followed by a tour of national stages in France. “And afterwards, I was going to read the text at the Chartreuse at the Festival d’Avignon. And I was 40 in the party. Big disappointment, therefore, that this missed opportunity for the author, especially since he was particularly excited by the show. “It’s a text that I really like. I’m happy. So I was eager to share it. It will finally be done at the Jean-Claude-Germain room.