Photo: Compagnie de la Pire Espèce

Denis Marleau a déjà interprété des textes d’Alfred Jarry à sa manière . Ses productions extrêmement recherchées et étroitement chorégraphiées de tout Jarry ( Ubu Cyle ) présentés au Centre national des arts d’Ottawa  dans les années 1980-90 lorsqu’il était directeur artistique du Théâtre français, ont surement laissé leur marque sur ce théâtre d’avant-garde. Maintenant, une nouvelle génération de comédiens québécois frénétiques, bourrés d’énergie et très doués, tentent leur chance avec le même auteur. L’esprit ubuesque est presque le même:  le grotesque, le cruel, le vulgaire, et la stupidité destructrice y sont mais l’esthétique théâtrale a radicalement changé.

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Poster from the 1947 film featuring Edmund Gwenn. Photo from Art.com. Inc.

During the intermission a tiny tot of 4 years old…one of Santa’s elves no doubt, wearing a red tuque, was wandering through the audience with a big smile on his face. He told me he loved it!  Several other young francophone ladies from Lasalle High School for the arts were standing around munching cookies, also looking very pleased.!! That is the miracle of this play/musical/film/radio drama that Plosive theatre has chosen for the holidays. Bring your young ones. They will have lots of fun and leave feeling good, even if it might seem a bit schmaltzy for the more cynical of the older crowd looking for more interesting theatre. This is a piece of feel good fluff that works its magic, so don’t go expecting anything else. But it is a real treat for the children.

Valentine Davies’ novel has gone through multiple transformations: Four different screen scripts, several books for musical theatre, rewritten as radio plays and as texts for the stage. This version seems to be inspired by the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast adaptation as a radio play in 1948, featuring Edmund Gwenn as Kringle, who also played the role in the first screen version in 1947 where the essentials of this story first appeared on screen. A man who thinks he is Kris Kringle is being committed to a psychiatric hospital (not called that in those days) because no one believes that Kringle/Santa really exists. Lux Radio Theatre adapted some of the best plays of the theater repertoire and they were always performed before live radio audiences and this is where John Cook’s adaptation sends us – back to that era of Radio theatre where we the audience are in the studio watching the actors, musicians and sound effects people putting on a radio play. For me, that is the most interesting aspect of the show.

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Photo de Marie-Claude Hamel.

Olivier Morin and Renaud Lacelle-Bourdon

This is a striking and engrossing piece of theatre, both because of the originality of the play and the highly imaginative work with the actors by director Catherine Vidal who is also responsible for the adaptation of the novel of the same name. The published work is one part of a trilogy composed of Le grand cahier, La prevue and Le troisième mensonge. The Grand Cahier is narrated alternatively by the voices of two male twin, young men who have been left by their mother in the care of their grandmother with whom they live through a disturbing family experience in an unidentified country ravaged by war.

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Photo: Permission of the Théâtre La Catapulte

Marcel Dubé  is  one of those rare  playwrights   who left his mark on  Québécois  theatre in the 1950s, 60’s and 70’s  because of his tough  neo naturalistic  vision of the stage  that  was greatly influenced by American playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil .  He was no doubt best known for  Un simple soldat (1958),  Les beaux dimanches (1968) and  Au retour des oies blanches  (1969).  Zone,  written in  1956 was first  translated into English is  1982. This version of Zone,  directed by Jean Stéphane Roy who is also the current artistic director of Théâtre La Catapulte has made some very minor changes in the text and  reorganized some scenes to correspond to his almost cinematographic vision of this production which is extremely powerful and   beautifully orchestrated from all perspectives.

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Photo: Trudi Lee

This production based on an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel is essentially a crowd pleaser.  Judging from  the thunderous applause and the standing ovation it generated from the public of all ages when I saw it the other night, this version of the novel certainly did everything to be “audience friendly”.  The set showed us very clearly that  the play comes from a real book with  pages flying  around the stage, apparently ripped out of the manuscript as they were repossessed by the stage.  The production even had moments of broad almost vulgar comedy , especially with the overblown caricatures by a giggly Mrs Bennet (M. Elizabeth Stepkowski Tarham) and Pierre Brault as Clergyman William Collins.
I must admit that Patrick Clark’s costumes were stunning and Jock Munro’s lighting captured the atmosphere beautifully, especially in the bath scene, perhaps a nod to the work of Ingres, an Austen contemporary, and in the final scene where Elizabeth Bennet (Shannon Taylor) and Mr Darcy (Tyrell Crews) at last bring themselves to admit their feelings for each other.

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