This is undoubtedly the most horrifying news item in recent years. Of unspeakable brutality, the murder committed by Luka Rocco Magnotta, “the dismemberer of Montreal”, still chills our blood a decade later.
With Homicide, author Pascal Brullemans and director Nini Bélanger started from the Magnotta affair to try to understand what truths lie beneath the mask of the monster. “The show is inspired by the Magnotta affair, but it is not a biopic,” adds Dany Boudreault, the interpreter of the infamous murderer.
Moreover, the name of the Canadian killer (and that of his victim, Lin Jun) does not appear anywhere in the production. Instead, Homicide takes us into the “psyche” of a young man after he commits “the first streaming murder in history.” His victim, played by actor Christian Rangel, will appear on stage, “like a silent presence, but one that refuses to be forgotten.”
When Pascal Brullemans had Boudreault read his new play three years ago, the author told him that he had written it for him.
Beyond the horror that the character inspires in us, how do we play a monster?
“You can’t play a monster,” replies Boudreault. I’m not trying to humanize a killer. The portrait that Pascal Brullemans painted is not gentle at all. As an interpreter, I try to understand how we can get there. What happened in his life, in his brain, to act like this? »
“It’s a show that concerns everyone,” says Boudreault. Because this murder symbolizes a desperate quest for recognition in society; to fill a huge void. The story transposes reality to enter the head of the murderer, his inner voice; even his inner voices, because the monologue is polyphonic. »
Homicide challenges the excesses of the digital age, narcissism and the desire for fame that we propagate online. “[The Magnotta affair] is not just an anomaly, a misbehavior that does not concern us,” writes Nini Bélanger in her note on the theater website. “There is a melancholy engendered by this paradox; the euphoria of the possibilities of the rise of digital technology in our lives versus the unease and anxiety that this same movement operates in our daily lives and our human relationships. »
The production also explores the troubled areas that exist between the representation of reality and reality. “The killer in the play strives to construct his own mythology to carry out his actions,” explains Boudreault. My character speaks in his own name, in that of his victim, his mother, Internet users, etc. He is an anonymous man, without talent, completely empty, seeking to emerge from his anonymity. »
And who will kill to exist.
Actor and author, we saw him on stage as Louis II of Bavaria (in Châteaux du ciel, at the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier), in the skin of Robert Mapplethorpe (Parce que la nuit, at Espace Go) and as Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As an author, he has written several adaptations, collections of poetry and plays, including Bodies Célestials and (e), a genre of epic, both published.
With the Messe Basse company, Boudreault is preparing, jointly with Maxime Carbonneau, the Ghost Corps project (working title), a river show which will be presented at Duceppe in 2025. The piece will retrace the journey of the LGBTQ community in Montreal.