✭✭✭✩✩

by Michel Tremblay, directed by Diana Leblanc

Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

September 26-October 5, 2014

           

Alex: “C’est pas l’amour, c’est l’égoïsme”

Théâtre français de Toronto is currently giving Toronto its second professional production of Michel Tremblay’s Le Passé antérieur (2003).  The first was in Linda Gaboriau’s English translation at the Tarragon Theatre in 2006 under the title Past Perfect.  The direction by Leah Cherniak was such an impediment to enjoyment at the Tarragon, it’s good to see another production, especially one like this that is close to ideal.  When the production itself is praiseworthy, the flaws it the work itself become all too clear.  Tremblay may be one of Canada’s greatest playwrights but Le Passé antérieur is far from his greatest play.

The main character of Le Passé antérieur is Albertine, a character who features in several of Tremblay’s novels but is best known from his play Albertine en cinq temps (Albertine in five times) from 1984.  In that play Tremblay has five actresses portray Albertine at ages 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70 who interact with each other and with her sister Madeleine.  Le Passé antérieur is solely concerned with one evening in the life of Albertine at age 20.  The point of this prequel is to fill us in on the missing decade in Albertine’s life, but it does not, in fact, tell us anything we could not have deduced from the earlier play.     

The intermissionless 105-minute-long play is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression.  Albertine has supposedly recovered from a nervous breakdown brought on when her boyfriend Alex dumped her for her younger sister Madeleine.  In fact, she is still consumed with rage and passion and has dressed herself up in her sister’s new dress hoping to meet Alex when he comes by for Madeleine and hoping to win him back.  In a series of four one-on-one confrontations, Albertine’s mother, her sister, her brother and finally Alex himself each tells Albertine that her ploy is futile, that she should face reality, that she should listen to others for a change and that her need for constant attention drives people away.  To counter them, Albertine insists that no one understands her because her passion is so absolute.   

“L’amour passion” is the phrase used to describe the all-consuming passionate love that drives the heroines of Racine’s tragedies like the title character of Phèdre (1677) or Hermione in Andromaque (1667).  All four of Albertine’s interlocutors tell her she over-dramatizes situations and Tremblay makes it difficult, if not impossible, to view Albertine’s “love” for Alex as any sort of “l’amour passion”.  Instead, we feel her four interlocutors are right when they say she is driven by extreme possessiveness and self-centredness.  In fact, Alex says outright of her suffocating “love”: “C’est pas l’amour, c’est l’égoïsme”.  

The first problem with the play is this that its central character is not merely unsympathetic but actively obnoxious and does not change in the course of the action.  Indeed, Albertine’s primary stance is that she refuses to change.  One might think when Alex himself says he does not and never did love her that Albertine might come to her senses, but, no, she insists that he is wrong.  All that happens is that she becomes more entrenched in her self-delusion, claiming at the end that she has become a “diamant noir” and that her life is over – “tout est fini avant de commencer”.  If Tremblay means Albertine’s statement to hold any profundity, he has already severely undercut it by writing about the next five decades of Albertine’s life. 

The second problem is that the play is inherently repetitive.  Since Albertine refuses to change, Tremblay essentially gives us the same conversation four times in a row.  The reappearance of Albertine’s mother at the end makes it five.  Le Passé antérieur has only about 20 minutes of new material to give us about Albertine that Tremblay has padded out to four times that length.  Tremblay may be trying to emulate the style of classical French tragedy by staging the play in a series of duologues, but after the highly experimental nature of Albertine en cinq temps, the structure of Le Passé antérieur comes off as conventional and dull.

In the Tarragon production, Leah Cherniak only added a series of directorial misjudgements to the play’s inherent flaws.  In the TfT production, in contrast, Diana Leblanc’s direction is so sensitive and nuanced that she very nearly succeeds in making a silk purse of a sow’s ear.

Her main advantage is an excellent cast.  As Albertine, Geneviève Dufour gives the impression of a young woman with a brittle personality held together only by force of will.  Dufour makes us feel that Albertine cannot compromise because any lessening of her strength of will would cause her to collapse.  At the same time Dufour makes clear that Albertine is, indeed, an egotist as everyone claims, to such an extent that only her view of the world is the right one.  There’s no way Dufour can make Albertine tragic, heroic or even sympathetic, but she does make us see that Albertine’s pose of tragedy is simply just a pose since, in the long run as En cinq temps shows, her present worldview will be replaced by at least five others.           

      

Patricia Marceau is very sympathetic as Albertine’s mother Victoire.  Indeed, we wonder how Victoire can keep her patience with such a perversely willful child.  Mélanie Beauchamp is also sympathetic as Madeleine.  Beauchamp makes Madeleine’s sincerity so obvious that we know she is telling the truth that she did not “steal” Alex away from Albertine.  As with Marceau’s Victoire, Beauchamp’s Madeleine conveys a deep concern for Albertine, who they know is only heading for greater pain by trying to win back Alex. 

In terms of the story, there is no particular reason why the play should include an encounter between Albertine and her brother Édouard except to contrast his supposedly “perverse” love with hethe rs.  Unlike Victoire and Madeleine, Édouard has nothing to gain or lose through Albertine plot.  Unnecessary though his scene is, Constant Bernard makes Édouard a memorable figure – a young gay man who has to make use of wit and humour to make up for his lack of physical attractiveness.  Nico Racicot is well cast as Alex, who comes across as a serious, conventional young man who quite understandably has no time for Albertine’s dramatics or her demands for all-consuming passion.

Tremblay has built the idea of theatricality into the play’s structure by having Albertine serve as a narrator between dialogues.  While the Tarragon production completely overplayed this aspect of the piece, Diana Leblanc underlines it much more subtly.  Glen Charles Landry’s set is a high circular platform backed by semi-opaque curtains.  When Albertine begins the play with her narration, Leblanc has the other four characters parade in front of the platform and take seats behind the curtain where Landry’s has them lit just enough so that they are always visible as they watch the action.  Initially, Leblanc has Alex walk in front of the platform another two times to reinforce both Albertine’s obsession and her situation of trying to steel herself while she awaits his arrival.  Melanie McNeill’s costumes admirably capture the period and, especially in the costumes for Madeleine and Victoire, the privations that people are suffering.  Albertine’s stylish red costume with its fanciful attached capelet clearly sets her apart from the others, but links her with Édouard’s own fantasy outfit with fez.

Toronto is unlikely to see a better production of Le Passé antérieur in the near future.  Since no one can disguise the thinness of the material or the play’s inherently static nature and repetitiveness, this play would definitely not make a good introduction for newcomers to Michel Tremblay.  The play’s main function is to show us the Albertine à 20 vingt ans that Tremblay, wisely it now seems, omitted from his earlier vehicle for Albertine, so far superior in invention and insight.  The present production is a fine display of the talents of all involved though all are in service of a work that will ultimately be of primary interest only to Tremblay completists.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Geneviève Dufour and Mélanie Beauchamp; Geneviève Dufour and Nico Racicot. ©2014 Marc Lemyre.

For tickets, visit http://theatrefrancais.com.