Trudeau Stories: A fondly funny look back in time.

Photo: Kelly Clipperton

Trudeau Stories By Brooke Johnson, Great Canadian Theatre Company Directed by Allyson McMackon

Pierre Elliott Trudeau may have been a kind of sorcerer, a shape-shifter and ultimately unknowable, to public affairs writer Richard Gwyn, who titled his 1980 book about the former prime minister The Northern Magus: Trudeau and Canada.

To Brooke Johnson, 40 years Trudeau’s junior, he was a friend, an occasional swimming and hiking companion, a man who once slid down an icy Montreal street with her shouting “Whee!”

Johnson relates the course of that unlikely friendship, one that began in 1985 when she was a theatre student at Montreal’s National Theatre School but which inevitably dimmed in the years that followed because of the busy life each was leading, in her finely sculpted, one-woman show Trudeau Stories.

A mix of storytelling and performance, the show is a compelling, clear-eyed and often fondly funny look back at a time when Johnson was a young artist searching for direction and identity and when Trudeau had left politics to return to the practice of law but had lost none of the insatiable curiosity, cerebral horsepower, and blend of public display and closely guarded privacy that marked his years at the helm of the federal Liberal party.

Johnson works with little other than a chair, replicas of letters she’d written to Trudeau over the years, and her economical use of body, voice and text to recreate in rich and telling detail the intimate but Platonic relationship the two had.

We see them when Trudeau, presumably attracted by this comely young woman who’s involved in the theatre – an art form he loved – insists on dancing with her when he’s invited to a National Theatre School event.

We see them together in his home when she visits for the first time, a bit overwhelmed by the tasteful Art Deco design and touched by the four sets of shoes – three belonging to his young sons, of whom he had custody following his divorce from Margaret Trudeau – parked in the entryway.

We see the friendship slowly develop, a curious but understandable match between this perceptive, often-awkward, and naïve but truthful woman and the skeptical, accomplished and worldly older man who suffers his own dark nights of the soul and hungers for the balm that friendship can offer.

And we see Johnson, always a bit of the outsider, join and then leave the throng attending Trudeau’s funeral in Montreal in 2000.

Directed by Allyson McMackon, Johnson vigorously eschews hagiography and sentimentally. While the Trudeau she shows us can be warm and engaged he can also be distant, mocking, seemingly uninterested in others – not much different from standard-issue humanity, in other words.

Just as importantly, Johnson never pretends that her understanding of Trudeau is anything other than her own, individual perception. It’s that truthfulness which doubtless attracted Trudeau and which lets us implicitly trust Johnson when she takes us inside her relationship with a magus who, at heart, was in so many ways surprisingly like the rest of us.

Trudeau Stories continues until Jan. 29

Playwright/performer: Brooke Johnson

Director: Allyson McMackon

Floor designer: Lindsay Anne Black
Lighting designer: Glenn Davidson: Lighting Designer