Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✩✩
by Carole Fréchette, translated by John Murrell, directed by Michael Shamata
Pleiades Theatre, Artword Theatre, Toronto
April 8-May 1, 2005
Pleiades Theatre is presenting the late Bill Glassco’s final project, a production of The Seven Days of Simon Labrosse, acted by members of the Montreal Young Company that he founded. Those who have seen Fréchette’s more recent plays like Elisa’s Skin or Helen’s Necklace will likely be disappointed. While Labrosse, too, plays on the ambiguities of existence, it has none of effortless grace of these later works.
The play is awash in metatheatricality. What we see is supposedly an autobiographical play written by and starring Simon Labrosse (Mike Hughes), an unemployed young man, staged in order to raise money for rent, a ghetto blaster and an operation to cure his ultra-negative friend Léo (Paul Fauteux). Arguments with Léo and the actress Nathalie (Manon St-Jules), who have their own agendas, periodically disrupt Simon’s play about how he reinvents himself every day despite the world’s indifference and his increasingly desperate situation.
An uneasy mix of contemporary satire with a parable about the ability of imagination to overcome adversity, the play is more thesis- than character-driven and seems too proud of its own cleverness. Hughes is well cast as the sympathetic, Candide-like Simon, an incurable optimist who talks about hopelessness without quite grasping the concept himself. Fauteux arouses both mirth and pity as Léo, whose overwhelming hatred of everything easily flips into self-loathing. St-Jules’s Nathalie shows how a loony obsession can lurk beneath a façade of ordinariness. While one appreciates the issues Fréchette raises, one wishes she had found a more elegant way of expressing them.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-04-21.
Photo: Michael Hughes.
2005-04-21
The Seven Days of Simon Labrosse