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by Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Eda Holmes

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

April 16-May 10, 2015

“Fantasy at the Farm”

After seeing half a dozen plays by Michel Marc Bouchard, it still amazes me that people take him seriously as a playwright.  He specializes in writing melodramas made up of equal parts of pretence and implausibility peopled by characters who act according to the needs of his plot rather than from any semblance of human nature.  During its first third Bouchard’s Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) from 2011, looks like it will finally be an exception.  His portrayal of a gay man who cannot express his grief to those around him is both touching and comic at once.  For a change, Tom begins at least as an identifiably human being negotiating a complex situation.  Unfortunately, in the final two-thirds of the play Bouchard switches the action into thriller mode and the implausibilities start piling up. 

The play begins with Tom (Jeff Lillico) having arrived at the empty farmhouse in the country owned by the mother of his lover and co-worker Guillaume, who was recently killed in a motorcycle accident.  When Guillaume’s mother Agathe (Rosemary Dunsmore) arrives, Tom is taken aback that she has never heard of him from Guillaume.  Tom is also surprised to find that Guillaume has a brother, Francis (Jeff Irving), whom Guillaume had never mentioned.  Agathe insists that Tom stay at the farm until the funeral for Guillaume the next day.  In the middle of the night, Francis puts Tom in a chokehold and demands that Tom never tell Agathe who he is or that Guillaume was gay.  Instead, Tom is to support the fantasy that Francis has built up to protect his mother that Guillaume had a girlfriend back in the city who speaks only French and no English.  Tom reports to Agathe a supposed phone call from Nathalie where Tom explains that she was too devastated to attend the funeral.  Francis notices that Tom has mixed in rather too much detail about his own feelings in this report and as punishment ties Tom’s wrists together and drags him for two kilometres around the farm. 

This punishment has so injured Tom’s wrists that he cannot feed himself or drive his expensive car.  Were Bouchard interested in realism, he would know that dragging a person over rough terrain for two kilometres could easily kill a person and thus would damage more than his wrists.  If the play were to follow a logical course, Tom would call the police or, at least, phone someone to pick him up and take him home.  Bouchard distracts us from this by having Tom deliver a speech about how ecstatic he is to see a cow give birth.  A new-found love of nature, an improbable attraction to the sadistic Francis because he looks like Guillaume, a desire to keep Agathe happy plus his injury become the unlikely reasons why Tom stays on at the farm (apparently without notifying his co-workers). 

When the play turns from a study of grief to a Stockholm Syndrome-style thriller the implausibilities start to accumulate.  Tom says that he would like the man who comes by to take the milk to help him, but there is a working telephone hanging prominently on the kitchen wall.  Why not use it?  By the same token, Tom has presumably told his co-workers that he has gone to Guillaume’s funeral.  Since Guillaume was also a co-worker, why, except for the convenience of the story, do no others from work attend his funeral?  Why also, does no one at work wonder where Tom is when he does not show up for several days?  Also, since the play is set in 2011 and Tom wears designer clothes and drives a fancy car, how is it he doesn’t have a cellphone.  Then he could text a distress message.  But, of course, Bouchard just doesn’t want us to think of this aspect of modernity because it would destroy his plot.

Bouchard chooses as his central grotesque image, Francis’s attack on a friend of Guillaume’s when they were teenagers.  Francis literally tore the boy’s face apart by putting his hands in the boy’s mouth, and pulling the boy’s jaws apart, dislocating them and then ripping the mouth open.  Bouchard is counting on the shock value of the description to stop rational thought.  After consulting a surgeon, I learned that for one person to inflict such an injury on another while that person is conscious is so improbable as to be impossible.  No teenager would have the strength required.  After all the jaws muscles are so strong because we use them to bite and chew.  The likeliest outcome of a person maliciously sticking his fingers into another’s mouth, is that his fingers would be bitten down to the bone, not that the victim’s jaws would be pried open, let alone the jaw muscles ripped. 

Is Francis punished for this crime?  No, because, as is usual in Bouchard’s plays, there seems to be no functional judicial or legal system in place.  We learn that everyone in the village knows what Francis did and shuns him because of it, but, incredibly, Francis is never prosecuted for it.  Did the victim have no friends or relatives to make Francis pay for such a gruesome assault? 

Bouchard ends the play with one more preposterous event to top all the rest.  He has Tom escape, by unknown means, from the locked trunk of a car.  Even though his wrists are still bandaged from the injury that Francis gave him and he can still not use them properly, Bouchard forgets this and allows Tom to be able to wield a shovel as a weapon and reproduce Francis’s implausible feat of jaw breaking.  In the latter instance, Bouchard again counts on shock to distract us from rational thinking.  As for the escape from the trunk, Bouchard has Agathe recite Bible verses about Christ’s disappearance from the tomb after death, to use one miracle to justify belief in another improbable action.

Even if we ignore Bouchard’s disregard for probability and common sense, there is a fundamental problem with the basic story.  Late in the play the we discover that Guillaume had deliberately left out his diaries detailing his homosexuality for his mother to find and read.  Agathe says that she did not read them because if her boy had a secret she wanted to find it out from his own mouth.  Since, however, Guillaume has not visited or phoned since he left home, Agathe’s superficially noble stance begins to look more like willful incuriousness, especially given that she knows Guillaume meant for her to read the diaries.  Knowing this makes us realize that the entire premise of the play has been dangling from the thinnest of threads. 

All these details matter only because Bouchard has turned the story into a thriller where one step must follow logically from the previous one to give the work a semblance of coherence.  As it is, the plot of Tom at the Farm is as full of holes as a moth-eaten carpet.  No wonder that Xavier Dolan kept only the bare bones of the plot when he wrote his screenplay for his film of Tom à la ferme in 2013.

The primary reason we can sit through Bouchard’s play is that provides such fine roles for actors whose intensity alone keeps us from looking too closely at the play’s inconsistencies.  Jeff Lillico is excellent in evoking the complex play of emotions in Tom, from the desolation of grief to his critical appraisal of oddities of country life.  The mixture of humour and sadness he conveys at least starts the play off with a ring of authenticity.  That’s why it is such a shame to lose this nuance when the play morphs into a thriller guided by rules of genre rather the development of character.

Jeff Irving’s character Francis is also complex although it takes longer for Bouchard to show us this.  He initially seems to be merely a sullen thug, but Irving shows that Francis’s aggression towards Tom hides an attraction that Francis doesn’t want to understand.  Bouchard could have made Francis’s divided nature clearer if he had suggested that Francis had previously been attracted to Guillaume, but he neglects to do this.  As it is, Irving emanates an aura of menace that engulfs the stage whenever he appears.

Rosemary Dunsmore makes Agathe a very sympathetic figure, reacting with all-too-typical motherly instincts to keep younger ones fed and comfortable and filled with commonplaces of social courtesy.  Yet, Dunsmore shows that Agathe is no fool.  And is it is precisely for that reason that Francis’s plan of hiding Guillaume’s sexuality with an elaborate story makes no sense since Francis assumes that his mother is a fool and can’t handle the truth.  The course of the play proves that as a loving mother she could have accepted Guillaume as he was. 

Christine Horne makes a brief but highly memorable appearance as Sara, a woman from work that Tom has phoned to turn up at the farm playing the Francophone Nathalie.  There is no reason Sara needs to appear in the play except to make Bouchard’s revenge plot work out.  The absence of Nathalie from the funeral had already been fully dealt with by means of Tom’s report of his (faked) phone call with her.  The one benefit of Sara’s arrival is that it sets up the best and funniest scene in the entire play with Sara speaking her terrible Anglophone French and, with Tom’s intentional mistranslations, trying to pass it off as authentic to rubes like Francis and Agathe.  Horne has played so many tragic roles, it is great to see her play comedy for a change. 

All in all, Tom at the Farm, despite all the hype, is a disappointment.  What starts out as a nuanced study of unspoken grief mixed with the comedy of a city mouse stuck in the country leads one to think that Bouchard will finally be able to throw off his bizarre enslavement to genres like the melodrama, the horror story and the thriller.  For once I thought Bouchard would be able to show real people dealing with real problems in the real world rather than with fantastic problems in the far-fetched world of his invention.  Unfortunately, Bouchard would rather focus on the made-up horrors of his tissue-thin fictional worlds than the real horrors of our own.  For a Canadian play about a gay man’s difficulty in expressing grief over the death of his lover, Daniel MacIvor’s In On It of 2001, trumps Tom at the Farm in every way.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Jeff Lillico and Jeff Irving; Jeff Irving and Rosemary Dunsmore; Jeff Lillico as Tom. ©2015 Jeremy Mimnagh.

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