What strikes when Christian Lapointe mounts Martin Crimp, in addition to the freedom and the bursting of the scenic conventions, it is the humor, the derision which permeates the universe of the British playwright. The author of the pieces In the Republic of Happiness and The rest you know from the movies has a grating way of laying bare, of stripping the world and social relations, more specifically here its mechanisms of domination.
When we’ve tortured ourselves enough is subtitled “Twelve Variations on Pamela by Samuel Richardson”. The 18th century scandal noveland century serves as a foundation for the work, which is more complex than its very disturbing initial situation announces: the affirmation of the entrenched supremacy of male power by a man who has kidnapped and imprisoned a woman he wants marry. The play gives rise to a succession of scenes which are often so many moving role plays, betraying the primacy of power at the heart of relationships. Issues also touching on the inequality of social classes, through the character of the accomplice governess (excellent Lise Castonguay). The result is provocative, destabilizing.
Martin Crimp notably questions our ability to express ourselves and to act truly freely, outside of the gendered roles that society constructs. The Man often dictates his score to the Woman. And the two characters sometimes play off each other, reversing, and therefore questioning, the male and female roles. The show also illustrates this through the mannequins representing two secondary characters. Thus this puppet, which the teenager embodied by Laura Côté-Bilodeau activates and makes speak.
Christian Lapointe has installed the piece in a playground reminiscent of a movie set — an eloquent scenography by Claire Renaud. The presence of a camera on stage makes this antagonistic duo a director and an actress – an echo of an environment that has not been spared from denunciations of abuse. The addition of this fiction, however, at the same time increases the levels and layers of representation, and the effect of distancing, within a room where everything already seems mediated.
The show at Prospero also offers a first encounter between two theater virtuosos. It’s an unmissable opportunity to admire Céline Bonnier and Emmanuel Schwartz in all their states, deploying different tones and registers of acting, from the derisory to the cruelty until the false appeasement of the final scene, which hides the hostility under its situation. seemingly banal. A formidable score for performers who totally commit their audacity, their strong presence, their mastery.