Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
by Michel Tremblay, directed by Guy Mignault
Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
October 18-November 4, 2006
Michel Tremblay’s latest play Bonbons assortis (“Assorted Candies”), now receiving its Toronto premiere, is very like his nostalgic For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (1998), only this time celebrating the influence of other family members as well as his mother’s. As in the earlier piece an actor (Sébastien Bertrand) plays Tremblay both as adult narrator and as a boy.
The problem is that the play’s sugar content is so high you’ll feel as if you’ve eaten four pounds of chocolate at one sitting. The first two anecdotes are very funny--the first about the crisis his mother (Marie-Hélène Fontaine) has when she can’t afford a wedding gift for a neighbour, the second about his female relatives’ fear of thunderstorms. It’s in the second two set during Christmas and including a phone call to Santa that the sickly sweetness becomes just too much. You long for a note of bitterness, but Tremblay deliberately gives the final anecdote a happy ending he says it didn’t have in real life.
The Théâtre français de Toronto gives the play a solid, attractive production with Fontaine as Tremblay’s poor but proud mother and director Guy Mignault as the scurrilous Josaphat-le-violon as standouts. Bertrand is fine as narrator but as Tremblay the little boy he, like the play, tries far too hard to be adorable.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-10-26.
Photo: Louise Nolan, Lina Blais and Marie-Hélène Fontaine. ©2006
2006-10-26
Bonbons assortis