“The speech conveying an experience is often more important than the experience itself,” author Bernard Werber once wrote. That’s exactly what I said to myself when discovering excerpts from the show To great evils, great speecheswhich will be launched this week, at Gesù.
The idea is simple, ultra-simple, even. And it simmered for years in the head of Luce Rozon, co-director, with her sister Lucie, of the production company Double Agents: building a show around the great speeches that have shaped our modern history.
Removed from the screens from which they have been coming to us for decades and from the tumult that most of the time accompanies them, these speeches reach our ears with incredible impact. What a luxury to be able to listen to a whole anthology in the tranquility of a performance hall.
Finally, we can welcome their weight, their grandiose flights and, sometimes, their poetry, other than through short extracts (often the same ones). Finally, we can savor each word and understand their meaning.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
The actor Marc Béland
This pleasure comes through the performance of actors Dorothée Berryman, Marc Béland, Naïla Louidort and Martin-David Peters, who deliver these speeches in a bare and gray setting. It is in this no man’s land urban that the session director Marie Guibourt parades around twenty personalities who have in common having left a legacy of speeches of great power.
Among these characters, we find Mother Teresa, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Georges Patton, Eli Wiesel, Emmeline Pankhurst, Gisèle Halimi, Simone Veil, Joséphine Baker, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Albert Camus, Malala Yousafzai, Hitler, Jacques Chirac, René Lévesque and Michèle Lalonde.
Rest assured, the actors are not trying to imitate these characters. It would have been grotesque. Rather, they aim to capture the essence of the key moment.
When Martin-David Peters does the famous Yes, We Can of Obama, he is not Obama, but we find the incredible force of this speech which quickly became history.
The speeches are not offered in their entirety. The difficult work of remodeling is due to Rémi Villemure, who is responsible for the adaptation. Why does one speech manage to stand the test of time and leave an impression while another is forgotten the day after its presentation? I asked him.
“There is no recipe for writing a good speech,” he told me. Often these people have given just one big speech in their entire life, but it counted. That said, a great speech is based on three things: the quality of the text, the oratorical talent of the person delivering it and the circumstances in which it is delivered. »
On this subject, we took care to precede each speech with a context which is projected at the back of the stage. This frame is crucial, because it can literally propel the speaker into orbit. General de Gaulle’s speech during the appeal of June 18, 1940 is a good example of this. “This speech absolutely gave birth to it,” adds Rémi Villemure.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
The actress Naïla Louidort
Most great speeches are written, thought out, and thought out (sometimes with the help of others).
The actress Dorothée Berryman finds in these speeches all the qualities of a good dramaturgical text. “There are climbs, plateaus… We feel that when we play them. In any case, I can tell you that the speech that Simone Veil gave in favor of abortion is well written in mosus. »
There are speeches delivered to the nearest comma and there are those which are improvised (or at least presented without paper). Charles de Gaulle (him again) excelled in the genre. “He improvised them, but in exceptional circumstances,” says Rémi Villemure. The liberation in 1944 or the speech at Montreal city hall are still not nothing. »
What is very interesting about this show is that we chose the texts based on their resonance in 2024. It is about racial struggles, poverty, social inequalities, abortion, dictatorship and feminism. “When we hear René Lévesque’s speeches, our relationship with the immigrants that the current news brings us takes on a particular meaning,” says Rémi Villemure.
After the success of the play Verdict (Verdict 2 is in preparation), where actors recreate famous pleadings, Double Agents puts on track this production based on significant speeches. In my column last Saturday, I talked to you about the phenomenon of large-scale or concept-based shows.
It seems that the approach to Double Agents revolves around this. But there is more. We feel a desire to reach the two poles of the spectator: his heart and his intelligence. What more ?
To great evils, great speechesfrom 1er to February 10 at Gesù, then on tour in Quebec