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by Marcel Dubé, directed by Jean Stéphane Roy

Théâtre français de Toronto and Théâtre La Catapulte, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

February 3-12, 2012;

La Nouvelle Scène, Ottawa

February 25 & March 3

“Où le bonheur humain est presque impossible”

For several years now, Soulpepper has been reviving classics of English-language Canadian theatre, a process that is necessary both to help us remember our heritage and to determine which plays of the past still speak to us today.  Fortunately for those living in Toronto and environs, Théâtre français de Toronto has been performing the same invaluable service for French-language Canadian theatre.  In 2008 it gave us L’Homme invisible/The Invisible Man (1981), a play by Patrice Desbiens essential to any discussion about the effects of bilingualism.  In 2010 it gave us Les Fridolinades (1938) by Gratien Gélinas, a play much heard of but seldom seen outside Quebec.  In 2011 it gave us À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971), which proved its reputation as one of Michel Tremblay’s greatest works.  This year it gives us Zone (1953), a play that marked Marcel Dubé as someone who dared to confront Quebecois society, and Canadian society in general, with the unpleasant realities of everyday life.         

In Zone, his first play, Dubé paints a dark portrait of disaffected youth.  Five characters form their own society with loyalty as its primary value, because in the larger society outside them there is nothing they can believe in--not family, religion or patriotism.  All have been tainted.  It is a mark of how relevant the play still is that these three value are still being touted, in Canada and the United States, as the ones that hold society together.  The alienation Dubé expresses has only grown worse and become formalized in the growth of gangs and gang culture.

By comparison with the troubles of today’s youth, the twentysomethings of Zone seem relatively innocent and romantic.  That is simply because Dubé perceived what was happening so early.  After all Zone premiered the same year as a film on similar subject, The Wild One (1953) and preceded Rebel without a Cause (1955).  The five characters smuggle American cigarettes into Quebec and sell them at a profit.  They don’t think of this as stealing but as punishing the government for allowing them and their families to grow up in poverty.

Tarzan, the leader of the gang, is an unloved orphan and views smuggling as a form of rebellion against the system.  Nicolas Desfossés plays him with a fierce intensity suggesting that the only good Tarzan sees in the world is his gang’s work and the love for the young girl Ciboulette, that he cannot acknowledge for fear of breaking up the strength of the gang as a whole.  Desfossés gives the sense that Tarzan uses his bravado as much to psych himself up as to inspire others since, ultimately, he knows that his enterprise must eventually fail.

Passe-Partout sets himself up as Tarzan’s rival in the gang both for the leadership and for possession of Ciboulette.  He uses the money he earns to provide for his mother.  He plays the big man when Tarzan is away and flirts violently with Ciboulette, yet when Tarzan returns he abjectly cowers before him.  Though never mentioned in the text, it does come to the surface in Jean Stéphane Roy’s direction and in Maxime Lavoie’s complex, nuanced performance that Passe-Partout longs to stay in the gang because he jealous of Tarzan and attracted to him.  We sense that he rebels against Tarzan in order to be punished, with violence substituting for love as the only acceptable link between them.

It is obvious that the two lead males’ gang names reflect a desire for adventure.  Tarzan may be King of the Jungle in pulp novels or on the screen, but Tarzan in Zone is only an insignificant player in crime in Quebec.  Passe-Partout “meaning “pass-key” may seem like a fine monicker for a criminal, but it is also the name of Phineas Fogg’s valet in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1873), and is appropriate for the ultimately servile position of the character in Zone. 

The character the two young men fight over is Ciboulette, whose name may derive from the 1926 operetta of the same name by Reynaldo Hahn, where the title character is also the object of many men’s desire.  Her link to the gang is her love for Tarzan, which she, too, cannot confess, fearing it will distract him from his work.  Frédérique Thérien makes her outwardly very tough, almost a tomboy, but inwardly a fantasist who romanticizes her relationship with Tarzan in order to give her life some sliver of meaning.

The two other gang members participate for practical reasons.  Tit-Noir, so named for his hair-colour, is saving the money to study as a priest.  Jean-Simon Traversy gives him an almost comical air of fastidiousness given his surroundings that helps single him out as the one most emotionally detached from the gang.  The fifth member is the mentally dim Moineau, whose name meaning “sparrow”, intimates that others regard him as a bird-brain.  He is saving the money to pay for music lessons and spends most of his time absorbed in comic books and seems to get asthma attacks if anyone takes his beloved harmonica out of his mouth.  Dave Jeniss makes this sympathetic character both comic and sad.  His overt absorption in a world of fantasy is simply a more explicit expression o the mentality of the other gang members who despite the confidence they assert are all involved in a smuggling operation in which they are mere cogs and over which they have no real control.  What Dubé shows so clearly is that these five have traded the powerlessness they had in the licit economy for the illusion of power in an illicit economy.  Speaking of Tarzan, the Chief of Police sums up the situation: “IL a voulu sortir d’une certaine zone de la société où le bonheur humain est presque impossible.”

Roy rolls all three police characters of Dubé’s original text into one “Le policier”, played with overwhelming menace by Richard J. Léger.  Although the gang members are criminals in the eyes of the law and although an American customs agent has been killed, we still feel that he uses undue harshness in dealing with the young adults. 

Roy directs the with great verve forcing the actors to rattle out their lines at an almost unnatural speed. He makes great use of Dominic Manca’s abstract set of iron girders and wire mesh that suggests images of prisons, traps and demolished buildings.  Though Zone is written in a naturalistic style, Roy’s direction is non-naturalistic.  One character “beats” another though they are separated by several feet.  Actors don’t exit but remain visible behind or beside the set.  The scene of the police raid on the gang is tightly choreographed.  The Policier’s interrogation of the five is perhaps Roy’s most inventive scene in having Léger rapidly question all five gang members using information gathered from one to trip up another until only Tarzan is left.  While Roy’s non-naturalistic staging and Guillaume Houët’s expressionist lighting help to bring out the universal aspects of the play, Roy’s choice of music grates on the ear since it tends to link the play to genre-bound movies and television shows about crime--something one thought he had been striving to avoid.

The love between Tarzan and Ciboulette has definite echoes of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with certain telling departures.  Dubé’s romantic couple are not from warring factions but within the same faction at war with the rest of society.  Shakespeare’s couple at least are able to confess and enjoy their love if only for a brief time, while Dubé’s couple deliberately sacrifice the joy for avowing their love to the preservation of the gang and wait until the gang’s destruction is immanent to admit the truth.  In this and in many other ways, Dubé shows that those at the lowest level of society are cursed with the impossibility of happiness both within it and outside of it.  The TfT/TLC production brings this grim reality to vital life and makes us wonder why the dynamics of dispossession that Dubé so clearly outlines are still with us and more intransigent than ever.                

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Nicolas Desfossés and Frédérique Thérien. ©2012 Sylvain Sabaté.

For tickets, visit www.theatrefrancais.com or http://catapulte.ca.