There are three of them — Pierre, Lucie and William — all threatened by age and isolated. The scene presents them to us around an old upright piano, in front of the side of a curtain which could be their last.
The first (Jacques Girard) appears happy, phone in hand. At the end of the phone, we would like to get his opinion. He complies: “Mostly agree, neither agree nor disagree, completely agree…”
Lucie (Sylvie Drapeau), for her part, will introduce a wavering of a strange quality: the one who loses her memory goes to the conversation… but returns more naturally to the window, she loves the rain. William (Jacques Leblanc), inhabited and dark, will have more charged reflections: his glimpsed suicide, the writing he is considering. His memories are full of life, weight… but find limited resonance.
“Together”, they will go through the essential current events (the melting of glaciers, the death of bees, seasonal workers), as well as the societal questions of the moment (the word “fat” banned from space public, the racism of which Lucie candidly suspects, the question of gender). The evidence of a changing of the guard is there: the society, which is changing, is no longer entirely theirs.
All their speeches, above all, remain without impact – an effect which is accentuated by the direction of play. Claude Poissant, here in his sixth staging of a text by Larry Tremblay, forces his troupe, excellent in its lackluster outbursts, to a surprising tone: on very written French with its negation marks, a more relaxed and usual pronunciation will accentuate the discrepancy. Where are the characters ? From where do they talk to us?
Common places
The arrival halfway through of Adèle (Marie Gignac, embittered) will energize a play that is quickly going in circles. A former media figure deprived of her voice by throat cancer, she will attack this society which no longer knows how to think, taking up the antiphon. Géraldine (Linda Sorgini, pathetic) will follow, who will add to the quintet’s redundancies her sad, unanswered remarks.
The question, all this time, sticks with us: what does this pitiful picture mean? Larry Tremblay’s writing is unique, as we know. The mechanics here still leave us perplexed.
The evening program announces a text on the absurdity of our time: “An era where personal freedoms annihilate the possibility of community, where living together must be anchored to our appalling individualism. » Especially since Tremblay’s dramaturgy is known for metaphorizing his era, there is perhaps a line here that we can follow.
And on this point, in the end there remains this uncomfortable feeling of a certain death in the background; behind the ridiculousness of the protagonists’ non-conversation, there is something worrying in their lack of control over the world – over any world, in fact.
In isolation, where there is no longer any shared space, entertainment will remain their only common space. The closing appearance of Clovis the clown (Thomas Boudreault-Côté, slender and disturbing) will be the most delightful aspect of the show – the most disturbing too. Death then usurps the harmless features of a mime.
Following this line, the old, however, are no longer old: only the subjects of a world where language, liberated on all platforms, has lost the consistency of a real address towards others.