Certain literary and theatrical classics relentlessly evolve in one field or another. Everyone has one thing in common: “To make a film, first, a good story, second, a good story, third, a good story,” quipped the filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. To do an opera too. The good story, an eternal source of inspiration, never ceases to bounce back in new finery, leaping from the novel to the stage or the screen. The public wins or loses, it depends, in reuniting with landscapes already traveled.
the Dune by Denis Villeneuve is a successful cinematographic transposition of an iconic book. Other directors are breaking their teeth on a cult work, suddenly disfigured by lame images and obscure interpretations. At least, the story well put together at its base and stuffed with hard-hitting lines provides a solid framework to whoever rubs it. To regain The sisters-in-law by Michel Tremblay in musical comedy and The feluettes by Michel Marc Bouchard at the opera was not surprising, in such a rich subject.
Reading the novel Orange grove by Larry Tremblay, published in 2015, beyond its socio-political charge and the poetry of its style, I was struck by the skillful twists and turns of its human war drama. This story of twin children, hostages of an unnamed Middle East, in the net of jihadism, seemed to me so well constructed, with so many ingenious reversals, that I had closed the book both stunned and in admiration.
Everything was there: barbarism, the beauty of a fruit plantation born out of the desert, the devastating bomb, the hatred, the sacrifice, the trauma, the bloodshed, the absurdity, the hope, in a madly well woven fable. We know the rest: winner of fifteen laurels, including that of Libraires du Québec, and in France of the Folio prize for high school students 2017, Orange grove immediately became a Quebec classic with universal reach, translated into several languages. “These birds have come a long way. Now their bright colors mingle with the orange grove where you just buried your parents, whispered the sweet voice of perfidious Soulayed to a man in mourning […] But can these nameless birds lessen your pain? Revenge is your mourning. “
Orange grove
In 2018, this powerful text was adapted on the boards with force and finesse at the Denise-Pelletier theater by Claude Poissant. However, here is the adventure of the two human drops of water from the desert transposed to the opera after a long pandemic delay.
I ran to the Monument-National to see its musical version (in cover at the Diamant de Québec on November 5 and 6) after rereading the novel. The lyrical voices and the staging of Pauline Vaillancourt possessed tone. No aria, a harsh side. Brass, percussion or chorus added a powerful tension to the most dramatic passages, under the baton of Lorraine Vaillancourt of the Nouvel Ensemble moderne.
This creation of Chants Libres on music with Euro-Asian influences by Zad Moultaka and a libretto by Larry Tremblay intrigued at first, then fascinated. The voice of countertenor Nicholas Burns in Amed haunted by his ghosts caressed the ear with its velvet, that of Nathalie Paulin, soprano playing the mother of twins, pushed the emotion towards its pure note.
Neither quite the same nor quite another, this Orange grove-the. The choir (initially pre-recorded) offered a really precious asset to the initial story, a vibrant echo of the great Greek tragedies: “Our gods / we pray to them / to give us stakes / to plant them / in the throats of our neighbors”, intoned those spectral voices at the opening. The black ceremony began.
The admirers of the novel found their marks there. The shadow of the grandmother still questioned the flowers in her garden, Tamara, the mother lived in her flesh a corny drama, the twins exchanged a suicide fate like a shirt, the sinister Soulayed hatched his dark machinations like a Shakespeare’s hero. Sections of the novel excluded from the libretto, including Aziz’s hospitalization and the immediate consequences of Amed’s confession, could be erased without betraying the work. Under the purity of the story, the 90 minutes of the show passed in the blink of an eye.
So I caught myself dreaming of finding Orange grove in the cinema, in the tradition ofFires by Denis Villeneuve, taken in 2010 from the play by Wajdi Mouawad exploring the same corner of the fiery world. Didn’t the good story signed Larry Tremblay persist in striking the minds in all its avatars? Enough to want to multiply to the mise en abyme the ricochets of his prose. From one reincarnation to another, one day, maybe, why not a film?