✭✭✭✭✩

by Patrice Desbiens, directed by Robert Bellefeuille, Esther Beauchemin, Roch Castonguay and Robert Marinier

Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

March 28-April 6, 2008

L’Homme invisible/The Invisible Man is definitely not a dramatization of H.G. Wells’s famous story nor is it in any way a conventional play.  Instead, it is an utterly fascinating multimedia performance piece using Franco-Ontarian Patrice Desbiens’s 1981 poem of the same double-barrelled title as text.  Few works in recent memory have interrelated spoken word, live music, light and projections in such minute detail and to such great effect.    

Lack of French is no reason not see this work.  Like the title, the hour-long piece is fully bilingual with nearly everything said in one language immediately spoken in the other.  Like Desbiens himself, the title character, grows up fully bilingual in Timmins in the 1950s.  His dual nature is represented on stage by two actors-Robert Marinier, who speaks mostly in English, and Roch Castonguay, who speaks mostly in French, both perched on ladders in identical costumes.  Born to a mother who loves Jesus more than her only child, the Invisible Man’s life’s goal is to become “visible.”  Like anyone from a small remote town he thinks he can do this by going to a “real” place, in this case Toronto, where he immerses himself in the counterculture of the 1960s.  Immersion is exactly the problem, for rather than finding his identity he feels like a submerged submarine observing everything through a periscope.  He leaves the Anglophone environment of Toronto for the Francophone ambience of Quebec City only to find himself again submerged.  Contrary to popular belief, his bilingualism makes him at home not everywhere but nowhere.  

If the point of piece were political or didactic it would fail.  Instead, it focuses on one individual’s experience in magic realist mode, moving from one arresting image to the next and overflowing with humour.  Marinier makes the Invisible Man’s English side showier and more outgoing.  Castonguay makes his French side more private and restrained.  Much of our interest lies in comparing how the two actors express the same sentiments.  Each shift of meaning is reflected in Daniel Boivin’s remarkably eerie music created on electric guitar and sampler.  At the same time Michael Brunet’s lighting is absolutely amazing.  The audience gasped at the first shift from black-and-white to colour.  Using the scrim in front of the actors and a cyclorama behind, Brunet makes the actors fade into the background or slowly come to the fore, very much as if he were photoshopping them right before our eyes.  Taken together all these elements combine to create an exhilarating experience.  While Desbiens’s immediate subject may be Franco-Ontarians as a minority within a minority, his allusive poetry allows this group to stand for any person or people whose dual background or internal conflicts prevent them from ever feeling at home.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-03-31.

Photo: Roch Castonguay and Robert Marinier.  ©Mathieu Girard.