Forty years after the last performance of the play Un reel ben beau, ben sad, the Théâtre du Rideau Vert and director Marc Béland have chosen to bring the play by Abitibi playwright Jeanne-Mance Delisle out of oblivion.
The play created in 1978 (and presented for the last time at the TNM in 1983) marked the dramaturgy here with its hard and sharp language. The show presented these days, however, risks making less of an impression.
Should we blame the passage of time, which erodes the relevance of certain masterpieces of yesteryear? Does Marc Béland’s brick-and-mortar approach to directing have something to do with it?
There is certainly a question of darkness here. The play recounts the hell of a family living in the greatest poverty, deep in a row in Abitibi, in the 1950s. Having come to seek their fortune in this supposed promised land, the Morins only found a bad place to settle down. The father, Tonio, reigns as a despot over his clan. It is nothing but cruelty and perversion for his wife Laurette and his three daughters. Only his son Gérald, whom everyone nicknames Ti-fou, seems to find favor in his eyes.
It must be said that the son apes the father even in his worst words. Violence brews in the sick mind of this child who nests in a man’s body, incapable of interposing himself between his drunken father and the rest of the siblings. Even the hands extended to this family on the verge of implosion will prove treacherous.
Certainly, poverty is still (and perhaps more than ever) relevant. Family violence (whether verbal or sexual) has not been relegated to the horrors of the past. But the dramaturgy from here and elsewhere does not lack examples to remind us of this with more subtleties and nuances.
The acting – again severely lacking in nuance – adds to this feeling of watching a play in adrift. The father (Frédéric Boivin) is all cries. The girls seem mentally poor, bordering on deficiency, laughing at the least opportune moments. Even Nathalie Mallette, an actress capable of moving us with a single look, cannot trigger in us the slightest sympathy in her role as a stoic mother, incapable of a single gesture to protect her family.
The play “depicts a part of our history that must not be obscured,” writes the artistic director of the Rideau Vert, Denise Filiatrault, in the show program. Certainly, we must not forget the sorrows and miseries of those who preceded us, just as we must celebrate the raw and uncompromising language which is that of Jeanne-Mance Delisle.
That being said, we had all the trouble in the world becoming passionate about this theatrical reel which, in the end, is neither beautiful nor poignant…