✭✭✭✩✩

by Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau,

directed by Eda Holmes

Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 19-December 13, 2009

Factory Theatre is currently presenting the English-language premiere of Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Madonna Painter, a play first staged in Italy in 2003.  It is a mixture of history, symbol and magic realism written in a purple prose that sometimes approaches poetry but often, in Linda Gaboriau’s translation, sounds stilted and overwrought.  Its 90-minutes begin well enough with an inquiry into the power of art and the objectification of beauty, but in the last 15 to 20 minutes the action, which had been teetering on the brink of pretence, loses all credibility and provokes unintentional laughter.

In 1918 a handsome Young Priest (played by the handsome Marc Bendavid) comes to a small Quebec village with the notion that art can save the populace from the Spanish Flu, a pandemic that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide by 1920.  He commissions an Italian artist (Juan Chioran) to paint a fresco of the Virgin Mary in the village church to be paid for by the town’s wealthiest citizen, a necrophiliac surgeon (Brian Dooley).  Bouchard tosses up topics concerning art versus reality, flesh versus spirit, beauty versus time, without developing any of them.  By the end the Young Priest unaccountably believes that art is idolatry, thus contradicting his initial view, the history of Catholic art and the driving premise of the play.

Bouchard’s characters are more walking symbols than real people whom he forces into actions that often defy logic or necessity.  The play would collapse entirely were it not for a superb cast who lend a sense of humanity to Bouchard’s puppets.  Bendavid fully captures the Young Priest’s ardour and naiveté, though it’s hard to believe a priest would be so naive not to see through the doctor’s creepy attraction to him, much less to put himself literally in his hands.  Jenny Young is excellent as woman the painter chooses as his model against her wishes.  Her strong stage presence makes her quasi-mystical position has the keeper of the villagers’ secrets vividly  believable.  It’s too bad Bouchard dispenses with her character as rashly as the painter.  Chioran, half of whose lines are in Italian, conveys both the painter’s swagger and its underlying deviousness.  Dooley ably suggests a sinister undertow to the doctor’s friendliness.  Bouchard presents one young woman (Shannon Taylor) as so innocent that she takes a description of the changing shape of a penis to mean that men themselves are shape-shifters.  If you think that country girls are really that ignorant, feel free to join Bouchard’s fans who acclaim him, mistakenly, as the next Michel Tremblay.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-25.

Photo: Marc Bendavid (foreground). ©Ed Gass Donnelly.