La Bordée opens the theatre season in an excellent way with The Quebec assemblydocumentary theatre bringing together four strangers with divergent points of view: a kind of Almost perfect dinner where the main course lies in the differences of opinion… which will not fail to be revealed.
The ideas about “what it is to belong to a society” of Dan (Christian Paul), an astonishing social economy worker with traditional values, will necessarily contrast with those of Dominic, a young Wendat storyteller, calm and liberal (Andawa Laveau). A left-wing activist involved in the last municipal election campaign, Rebecca (Rosalie Cournoyer) will find a solid opposite number in Simon, a libertarian businessman and occasional speaker on Radio X.
If the latter portrays a very reduced vision of the collective, even Teflon, his opposite number in return embodies the difficulty that progressive discourse can have in tackling the arguments of others head on in a real dialogue – here, the character embodied by Jean-Philippe Côté “truer than life”, whose facial expressions and suppressed reactions we will find ourselves following.
The four “characters” nevertheless constitute coherent and credible, even familiar, figures. And this is where The Quebec assemblyresulting from the project undertaken seven years ago by Porte Parole, achieves its greatest success: in the extreme plausibility of what is presented to us.
Blind spots
Through immigration, wokeism and the tramway file — for interviews conducted in the fall of 2023 — it is necessary to note an omnipresent humor nourished by well-rehearsed gags, by finely reproduced dynamics: we laugh a lot, which is saying something for a show exploring our tensions. It is also saying something about the balanced qualities of a text (Alex Ivanovici and Brett Watson) that has managed to stick to its subject and whose clarity is doubled in the staging.
Screens above a conference table offered in bifrontal mode allow us to follow the facial expressions selected, in a stage arrangement with sounds and lighting that, evoking the TV quiz show, still fit surprisingly well. The work of Alexandre Fecteau, on an original staging by Chris Abraham, with its discreet ingenuity and skillful direction, finishes off the performance perfectly fluid.
Among other topics covered, the question of femininity will also creep in, particularly in a divide that is prolonged by the hosts Pierre-Yves Charbonneau and Marie-Ève Lussier-Gariépy… but which could have been dealt with more clearly.
A final part of the show, giving the audience a voice, will thus appear, on the opening night, as a surprising stroke of reality; beyond the challenges of mobility or identity, this one will seem particularly striking. By targeting the use of emotion in the exchange, the words of spectators will bring back to the stage a tension that is almost blurred like a shadow, but perhaps even deeper than the better marked divisions of the left-right axis.
We would have liked to feel the treatment extend here to the finale of the show. This is however one of the reflections that a remarkable show leaves; one of the questions that leave their anchors in the most customary of our daily lives.
This one, too, when the piece does not allow us to decide: to what extent do we really want to compose with each other?