Scheduled for March 2020, this adaptation of Witches of Salem had had the good fortune to fall at the same time very badly, having been canceled by the confinement even as she was about to fly, and oddly fair, thanks to her themes. This bad fate dispelled, the expected production finally sees the light of day at the Denise-Pelletier theater.
Remember that Arthur Miller’s famous play is also rooted in a dangerous contagion, a fever of denouncements that grips an entire frightened community. An always patent cocktail of superstition, paranoia, ignorance and collective hysteria …
A relentless pulse
It is under an implacable pulse – a sound design by Alexander McSween – that the show staged by Édith Patenaude takes place. Martin Sirois’s limited insights also make palpable the oppressive austerity and obscurity of this Puritan world. If Sarah Berthiaume’s adaptation does not transpose the play from 1692 to our time, it puts forward an oblique point of view in relation to the text created to denounce McCarthyism, shifting its focus a little at certain times.
The powerful show opens and ends with the group of teenagers led by the rebellious Abigail (Emmanuelle Lussier-Martinez, who wins). Those who, because they gave free rein to impulses prohibited in this obscurantist era, will trigger the witchcraft tribunal. But the main addition of the Quebec author is to make the slave Tituba a sort of spokesperson for creators in the era of #MoiAussi.
In the taking prologue, then in a monologue where the character leaves the room to take a contemporary look at this story – or even question it – of a man trapped by the lies of young girls.
A surprising scene, but one which seduces in particular thanks to the authority commanded by Anna Beaupré Moulounda.
Otherwise, the play is unchanged: the heart of the story is centered on the Proctor household, torn apart by his own adultery, embodied with conviction by Étienne Pilon, very intense, and Eveline Gélinas, of a worthy humanity. Within the cast, also emerges the fragility of Elisabeth Smith in Mary, the poor servant harassed from all sides.
Witches of Salem remains, and this is its strength, a striking illustration of the mechanics of denunciation, of its ripple effect in a community.
Here, we understand it, denouncing becomes a tool of survival, giving power to those who are generally dispossessed of it, who can only point an accusing finger at others in order to divert the machine from themselves.
A crazy mechanism, also nourished by jealousy and human enmities, which even seems, in the end, to have escaped the figures of authority, these initial instruments of religious justice. A demonstration of which all the relevance remains intact.