The Rideau Vert season opens with the play L’ombre, by a collective of young authors and performers, directed by Marie Brassard. Carried by nine theater school graduates in 2022, the show is a strange prologue to the launch of the 75th anniversary of the company founded by Yvette Brind’Amour and Mercedes Palomino.
“No horizon!” It was this lack of perspective that troubled theater man Mani Soleymanlou, after a discussion with graduates in play during the pandemic. This “impossibility of dreaming”, “of projecting oneself”, was the trigger for L’ombre, a show co-produced by the Rideau Vert and the French Theater of the National Arts Centre. A dark proposition, very intense, and which illustrates one thing clearly: the future is anything but bright for the youth of today.
The shadow is a “multi-sensory” spectacle. Game, light, gesture, sound, music and voices are as much in the foreground as speech. The director Marie Brassard, with the collaboration of her team in the design of the costumes, lighting, decor and music (this one by Alexander MacSween is omnipresent and bewitching!), has put together this visually very rich show… But dramatically poor .
In one act of 80 minutes, a chorus of eight actors stands out to each deliver a monologue, interspersed with interventions by the corypheus (Marion Daigle). Without preambles, the performers tell their stories in a poetic, even ceremonial way. It is about vertigo, spleen, ghosts… Blood, fear and wind. We talk a lot about the wind in this production. Is it an allegory to the difficulty of moving forward into the future?
“Every morning I vomit my emptiness,” says a figure at the bedside of a dying man in a hospital room. Finally, we imagine that it is a hospital. Because from one scene to another, we suddenly change places (we go from a rave to a forest, from a lake to the orange metro line…). Without putting the story in context. We often get lost in the maze of these mysterious monologues.
The shadow is a short and repetitive theatrical experience. An austere “tribute to the imagination” that evokes a black mass. A ritual to atone for the dark side of a generation without a future. But this is not the first to feel sidelined by society. After all, each generation of artists wants to revolt against the previous one. The Boomers did it with L’Osstidcho; the “X” with Cabaret Neiges Noires…
You still have to be able to shake the cage; and take our message from the stage to the audience.
