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by Francis Veber, directed by Guy Mignault

Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

April 20-May 5, 2012

“The Triumph of Innocence”

In 2009 the Théâtre français de Toronto won great critical and popular acclaim for its production of Francis Veber’s Le Dîner des cons.  The central character of that play was the innocent François Pignon, a naïf whose childlike view of life made him appear like a fool to others who deemed themselves more “sophisticated”.  Now the TfT had brought François Pignon back in L’Emmerdeur, Veber’s 2005 rewrite of the 1969 play Le Contrat where Pignon was first conceived.  The 80-minute play whose title is usually translated as “The Pain in the Ass”, is pure farce and Guy Mignault is one of the few directors in Canada who knows how to stage this most theatrical of genres.

The first thing you notice when you enter the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs in the fantastic set designed by Dominic Manca.  In a relatively small space he has managed to create two adjacent rooms in a hotel with a communicating doors between them and enough of the wall supporting the doors to suggest the invisible barrier separating the two rooms that are mirror images of each other.  This is one of most elaborate sets ever seen at the TfT, and Manca’s detailing and lighting already suggest that the hotel is somewhere in the south of France.  The sets of farce are known for their plethora of doors and Manca has managed to give each of the rooms four doors, including the communicating door, plus a large window that will also figure as an exit and entrance.

Two very different people check into these lodgings.  Into the room on stage left enter Paul Essiembre as Ralph Milan, a contact killer who has been hired to kill Louis Randoni, who, as we learn from a radio report, has come to Nice to testify against the other members of his gang and to name names.  Milan’s room has a perfect view of the courthouse and he is merely waiting for Randoni to arrive and walk up the courthouse steps so he can take him out with his high-powered rifle. 

In the other room on stage right enters Pierre Simpson as François Pignon.  He is a photographer for cheap tabloid but the reason he has checked into the hotel is to commit suicide.  His wife of eight years, Louise (Stéphanie Broschart), has moved in with her psychiatrist Dr. Wolf (Manuel Verreydt), but François still loves her and gives her the ultimatum to come back to him or he will do himself in.  Pignon’s situation gets off to a bad start when Louise hangs up on his first phone calls to her before he can deliver his ultimatum.  Taking the clearly flimsy tasselled curtain tieback as his hangman’s rope, Pignon heads to the bathroom to hang himself in the shower. 

His failed attempt brings Milan and Pignon in contact via the hotel’s aged bellhop (René Lemieux), who says he is obliged to contact the police.  The police, of course, are exactly what Milan does not want so he feigns friendship for Pignon to convince the bellhop that everything is fine.  The only difficulty is that the innocent Pignon, feeling so alone because of Louise’s rejection, takes Milan’s feigned friendship as real.  The question we and Milan want to know is how will Milan get rid of his new “friend” long enough to do his job?

It is well known that comedy is harder to act and directed than tragedy, and, of the various kinds of comedy, farce is the most difficult.  The reason is that unlike tragedy or high comedy there are no themes or subtexts to work out.  The physical actions that happen on stage are all there is and to make this work on stage demands extreme precision in directing and in the comic timing of the actors.  Christopher Newton used to explain this in his pre-curtain talks before the various farces he used to stage at the Shaw Festival.  He called farce the most theatrical of dramatic genres.  Guy Mignault knows this, too, and quotes his mentor Jean Gascon as saying, “C’est du théâtre musclé!” (“It’s muscular theatre!”). 

Mignault’s mastery of the genre and that of Essiembre and Simpson is evident right at the start of the play when the two men are in there rooms and without a word try to determine whether there is someone else in the other room.  Mignault’s choreography of the growing suspicion on the part of each that the other room is occupied provides a miniature masterclass on how purely physical movement and gestures can be made both realistic and comic through expert timing.

This precision includes all the inopportune moments when the bellhop decides to enter to see how things are going and all the times Pignon tries to help Milan, each intervention, of course, only making it even harder for the hitman to concentrate.  The physical action culminates in a hilarious scene where Mignault stages two fights occurring simultaneously--Dr. Wolf, discovering that Pignon is Louise’s annoying husband, tries to kill him while Milan tries to kill a policeman (Patrick Romango) investigating the strange goings-on outside Milan’s window.  Not only are the simultaneous fights expertly staged but both conclude in each pair of men struggling on the bed in their room that gives the intrusive bellhop quite the wrong impression of what is going on.

The success of the show rests on the comedic abilities of Simpson and Essiembre, who both appeared in Le Dîner des cons, with Simpson reprising his role as Pignon.  The reason why so many revivals of farces fail is that either the director or the actors feel they need to do something to make the action funnier.  What Mignault, Essiembre and Simpson all clearly demonstrate is that farce is funniest when played absolutely straight.  The more seriously the characters take the situation they are in the funnier the play seems to us.  Indeed, the humour in comedy is increased when there appears a real sense of danger, and with a hitman in the room with his rifle this danger is ever present.  Essiembre, despite the increasingly ridiculous things that happen to his character, never lets us forget that Milan is a figure of menace and would kill Pignon in a second if only he had the chance.

For his part, Simpson, as he showed in Le Dîner des cons, is an ideal Pignon.  His inherent innocence and goodness make him absolutely unaware of the disruption he causes to all around him.  He greets the shower of abuse others hurl at him as mistaken.  Since he loves his wife, he can’t believe she doesn’t still love him.  Since Milan saved his life, he can’t believe that Milan is not his friend.  The calm and naïveté that Simpson project so well make the chaos that he unintentionally creates even more amusing.

The supporting cast all do excellent work, even if for Romango it involves being repeated beaten up and shoved in a closet.  Lemieux is a genial presence as the bellhop, who is rather an “emmerdeur” himself whose constant interruptions to help have just the opposite effect. 

François Pignon (sometimes called “François Perrin”) has appeared in at least fifteen films written or directed by Francis Veber.  L’Emmerdeur itself was remade in English by Billy Wilder in 1981 as Buddy Buddy and has even been the source of films in Turkish (1982) and Hindi (2012), suggesting that the character has universal appeal.  Although farce intentionally has no deeper meaning in a conventional sense, Pignon represents the triumph of innocence over cynicism and inhumanity.  Do we really want the humiliating “dîner des cons” of that play to be a success?  Do we really want Milan to carry out his assassination?  Pignon’s inability to see the meanness in people’s words and actions may drive them around the bend, but in his own clumsy way he offers a beatific smile that wears down even the most negative people around him into submission.  You you’re looking to lift your spirits, 80 minutes with François Pignon will do the trick.  

L’Emmerdeur is presented in French with English surtitles on April 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, May 2, 4 and 5.              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Paul Essiembre, Pierre Simpson and René Lemieux. ©2012 Marc Lemyre.

For tickets, visit www.theatrefrancais.com.