Tag: in English 2018 NAC english theatre

Up to Low comes home at last to the NAC!

Up to Low comes home at last to the NAC!

Photo David Hou; Chris Ralph, Brendan McMurtry- Howlett, Attila Clemann

Ottawa to Wakefield in 1950 was a bumpy road covered with pebbles that used to make the car shake until the fenders came loose.  Such was the trip made by local cottage goers into the Francophone Pontiac but nothing as harrowing or as colourful as writer Bryan Doyle suggests . His memories are piled high with everyone’s stories filtered  through the expanding imagination of 15 year old Tommy, producing an epic  tale right out of western Quebec where even the vicious black flies have a role as the great villains of the plot, thanks to the opening solo by Pierre Brault. This is about local Quebec culture but Janet Irwin’s deft staging and the well written adaptation brings this story telling up to the level of mythology that resounds singularly like the magical arctic world captured by Robert W. Service’s  The Cremation of Sam McGee and .

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887 lepage at the NAC: technology masterfully used to support storytelling

887 lepage at the NAC: technology masterfully used to support storytelling

887 Robert Lepage,   Photo  Erick Labbé

Robert Lepage’s 887, named after his childhood home address, deals with the unstable, vague nature of personal and collective memory. It’s an autobiographical show, in which he recalls his childhood in Québec City during the turbulent 1960s.

Details about his father and his immediate surroundings, as well as the Quiet Revolution and its consequences, frame his childhood and shape his identity, to an extent that surprises even Lepage. The snippets of story are nestled within the frame of the artist’s struggle to remember the words to “Speak White” By Michèle Lalonde, a poem dealing with the cultural and linguistic imperialism of the English-speaking world.

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