It is in babies, as temporal markers, that Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Sarah Berthiaume and Catherine De Léan count the time that has passed since the beginning of the project to adapt the best-selling novel for the stage. The woman who runs away. Since the first reading, on the occasion of the International Literature Festival in 2016, in Montreal, the three women who, unlike the heroine of the book and the play, Suzanne Meloche, manage to combine creative ambitions and parenthood, have seen their families grow or expand. “When this project was born, I didn’t have my children yet,” confides Sarah Berthiaume, who wrote the stage adaptation. “So the writing process followed me in learning to juggle a career in art and being a mother. The experience of motherhood is an absolute love, but one that suffocates. It’s like a sacrifice.”
Thus, the playwright hears “this call for air, this need to flee” that her protagonist felt, while considering that it would be “unthinkable” for her to abandon her offspring. “I think that’s what makes this character rich. She remains unforgivable and yet, the novel and now my play, I hope, because I wanted to embrace the same movement, try to move from the unforgivable to a certain understanding, even to empathy.”
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette was far from suspecting the scope that her quest would take to retrace the trajectory of her grandmother, a painter and poet who witnessed the development of the Global refusalwho left her husband and children to try to repair the wings that family obligations, within an ultrapatriarchal society, had clipped her. Initially printed in a small print run, the work won over the public and won, among others, the France-Québec literary prize and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. “It’s the writing posture that is beautiful,” asserts with conviction Catherine De Léan, who plays the role of the narrator on the stage of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. “It is contemporary and audacious. My character speaks to her grandmother throughout the show. She is not judgmental, but rather curious. We are in a very personal relationship.” Which would avoid, according to her, the distance that historical subjects often engender.
When she visits schools to talk about The woman who runs awayits author also notes the same indifference to the past that she herself felt as a child. “I was told about the Great Darkness and the Global refusaland even if my grandfather was in the photos, I didn’t care. It seemed to me to belong to a hyper-dusty era with which I found no resonance. I think that with the book, we came to put our hands in it, to stir up the dust, and young people, even those who come from elsewhere, from the Maghreb for example, identify with Borduas, they identify with the disgusted passion of a sclerotic era. We find correspondences today with another type of great darkness, of immobility. We are immobile in many respects at the moment in society. Well, the revolt, it belongs to us! The little assholes of Global refusal who were in their twenties, that’s us. That dust is living matter. It still composes us and, if we revive it, it can feed current impulses of revolt. I think that this piece can do that.”
Rebel Legacy
The divisive figure that is Suzanne Meloche of The woman who runs awaywhich will be played by several performers on stage (including Evelyne Gélinas and Louise Laprade), thus marking the passage of time, was first shaped by Barbeau-Lavalette to fill the gap that was eating away at the maternal line. “Grandmothers are important in the way we define ourselves,” says Catherine De Léan. “My grandmother had 13 children, but she made earrings with buttons, masks with old vinyl records that she melted down, and on Sundays, she went to the hairdresser. All of that nourishes me, builds me. Knowing these things gives me strength and permission.”
The author of River Woman and of Forest woman who, just after giving birth to her third child, was going to shoot the film Insh’Allah in a refugee camp in Kurdistan, recognizes, in this sense, her debt to her grandmother: “As much as I have an ambiguous relationship with all the pain she has sown – because it leaves scars in a family history -, as much, with regard to permissions, no doubt I owe her some”, she says, provoking the hilarity of her companions.
This audacity, which was also advocated by the iconoclastic automatist movement, will find an echo in Alexia Bürger’s staging. “We are not in historical realism,” Berthiaume affirms. “We wanted to create a show in the image of this spirit, that is, free, non-figurative, formal, radical, pictorial.” It is a choir – and its individual constituents – that will provide the response to the character of Suzanne. The actors do not necessarily resemble those they embody, specifies De Léan: “They are spots of color, inspirations that lead to the creation of a myth.”
The scenography, she reveals, will also allow us to see Meloche’s pictorial work, just as the text makes room for extracts from his book. Flashing AurorasPublished in 1980 after being found in the archives of Paul-Émile Borduas, these poems were reissued last spring in the collection Surrealist Imaginaries (Red Herbs). “She must be turning in her grave… oh my!” sighs her granddaughter, sporting a bittersweet smile. Because it is indeed a rehabilitation of her work that Barbeau-Lavalette has undertaken. “When I started the novel,” she recalls, “I typed Suzanne Meloche on the Internet and there was no entry. She was invisible. That it could have resurrected her, brought her back into the collective memory, that her name is there when we now evoke the Global refusal or the women artists of that time, I find that it is a beautiful historical reparation. A sweet revenge on history.”