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by Michel Tremblay, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Diana Leblanc

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

September 23-October 17, 2015

Marie-Lou: “Crazy people must be truly happy”

Soulpepper expands its continuing exploration of classic Canadian drama with its first-ever production of a play by Michel Tremblay.  With Yours Forever, Marie-Lou (1971) it could hardly have made a better choice since the play is among the prolific author’s greatest works.  If Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) uncovers tragedy amid the American middle class, Tremblay’s play uncovers tragedy amid the Quebecois working class.  Diana Leblanc directed the play in French for Théâtre français de Toronto in 2011 to celebrate the work’s 40th anniversary.  That production was one of my top ten productions of the year.  If the present production does not quite reach those heights, it is still extremely powerful and is the one must-see of Soulpepper’s fall season.

Marie-Lou is both innovative in structure and profound in content.  The action unfolds on two physical levels that symbolize two different time periods.  Raised up at the back of the stage are Marie-Lou (Patricia Marceau) and her husband Léopold (Christian Laurin).  Downstage front are the couple’s two daughters Manon (Geneviève Dufour) and Carmen (Suzanne Roberts Smith).  The impetus for the action is Carmen’s visit to Manon to boast about the freedom she has found and to plead with Manon one last time to give up her self-imposed isolation. 

The conversation of the two sisters takes place in the present (that is in 1971) while the conversation of the parents takes place both ten years earlier when both were still alive and in the present as far as it exists in Manon’s memory.  Carmen meets Manon in the family apartment where Manon has lived since their parents’ death in a car crash.  Carmen has left the family home and found a success of sorts singing cowboy songs at a bar on the Main.  She thinks she has escaped her parents negative influence and implores Manon to do the same.  But Manon still haunted by the past and her parents’ death and spends each day reliving the past and praying for her parents.   

To show the parents’ influence, Tremblay presents the acrimonious conversation of Marie-Louise and Léopold of ten years ago as inextricably intertwined with that of the sisters.  Words of the children echo those of their parents.  Words of the parents provoke memories in the children.  While we agree with Carmen that Manon must free herself from memory in order to live a normal life, the play’s structure suggests that neither one can totally be free of the past.      

Tremblay carefully escalates the parents’ argument from a comical disagreement about coffee, toast and peanut butter to a deadly serious one about madness and death.  The seemingly banal surface eventually gives way to the deep rift beneath.  In twenty years of marriage Marie-Louise and Léopold have grown to loath each other.  Marie-Louise’s news that she is pregnant again is what provokes the crisis between them.  There is already barely enough money or room for the parents, the two daughters and their unseen brother Roger.  Marie-Louise’s pregnancy is not an occasion for joy but despair.

Tremblay constructs the dialogue so carefully that at first we, like Manon, side completely with Marie-Louise against Léopold, who seems like an ignorant misogynist brute who wastes his paycheque in drink.  As the argument between the parents progresses, it becomes clearer that a large number of factors have caused Léopold to be the self-loathing person he is.  Though Marie-Louise cruelly mocks him for it, Léopold is more fearful of the madness that runs in his family than he admits.  The one point he makes that shuts up Marie-Louise’s unending stream of criticism is Léopold’s revelation of her unnatural hatred of intimacy of any kind.  As their argument progresses we start to shift to Carmen’s point of view that both are equally to blame for their loveless marriage.

Carmen’s point of view cannot convince Manon, who seems determined to immure herself in the family home as a kind of secular nun worshipping her mother as a saint and praying for her father’s damnation.  Manon’s ideal is to be like her mother, but Tremblay shows that she is more like her father than she would like to admit.  Manon’s description of the wonderful haze that surrounds her when she is in prayer exactly echoes Léopold’s description of the haze that surrounds him when he has drunk enough beer. 

Glen Charles Landry created a masterpiece of a set for the TfT production that enshrined the ever-knitting Marie-Louise on a throne of balls of wool and the ever-drinking Léopold on a a throne of beer bottles.  Landry does not replicate that great image, but he also does not find anything as arresting to replace it.  His new set looks like an automobile junkyard that flows from two high mounds at the back where Marie-Louise and Léopold are ensconced toward the front which is littered with isolated auto parts.  One leg of Manon’s dinette table sticks through a hole in a rusty fender.  The yellow diving line of a highway divides the set in two.  The point is clear that the accident ten years ago continues to loom large (literally) in Manon’s mind, but the effect is not as elegant as the TfT set.

The best scenic effect occurs when the conversation of Manon and Carmen suddenly shifts to the past.  Todd Charlton’s eerie sound cue signals the moments clearly and Kimberley Purtell suddenly lights up a door that Landry has hidden behind the black scrim at the back.  The sisters are momentarily children again listening through the doorway at their parents arguing.

Director Diana Leblanc has drawn fine performances from the cast.  At first the viciousness of the accusations between Marceau’s Marie-Louise and Laurin’s Léopold make them seem like the Quebecois working-class version of Edward Albee’s George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).  Gradually, however, Marceau allows a tone of pity to creep into Marie-Louise’s remarks, especially when she realizes just how afraid of madness Léopold is and admits that his fits of anger have seemed like fits of madness.  Gradually, too, Laurin allows a tone of defeat to reign in Léopold’s comments and we see that the family tyrant feels defeated at work, defeated by heredity and defeated at home by his wife’s religiosity.  

As for the sisters, Geneviève Dufour is marvellous as Manon, her very defensiveness seeming to confirm Carmen’s accusations that she is more like her father than her mother.  Leblanc adds action to this production to reinforce and reveal Manon’s nature.  At one point, Manon puts on a sweater that is exactly like the one  Marceau is wearing as Marie-Louise, but Leblanc also reinforces Manon’s parallel with her father.  Léopold tells that he sometimes loves to overturn the table in front of him filled with full bottles of beer just to show his power.  Soon thereafter Leblanc has Manon suddenly overturn the kitchen table in her anger at Carmen – a moment that sends chills up the spine.  These actions along with Dufour’s complex portrayal show us just how conflicted Manon really is.

Suzanne Roberts Smith, dressed in a gaudy 1970s outfit by designer Melanie McNeill, trumpets he new-found freedom so boldly we wonder if her life is really as carefree as she claims.  The physical set-up of the action suggests that she is as haunted by memories of her parents as Manon but is more successful in repressing them.  The joy she claims in singing cowboy songs has a negative political side to it of which she is not aware.  The intro music Leblanc has chosen for the show consists entirely of American pop songs sung in French including “Comme d’habitude” from 1967 which began life in French, found success with Frank Sinatra when given English lyrics by Paul Anka and was recorded again by Francophone artists.  The point Leblanc makes is that Carmen has escaped oppression in the family home only to embrace a form of cultural oppression as an example of freedom.  Unlike Mélanie Beauchamp in Leblanc’s TfT production, Smith does not lend some of Carmen’s more positive assertions an undercurrent of doubt that would demonstrate that Carmen is at least as complex as Manon. 

Those who saw the TfT production in 2011 may not feel they need to see another production of the play quite so soon, especially since the TfT production was so near to ideal and since it was in the original French as opposed Linda Gaboriau’s new English translation*.  Those who did not see the TfT production, however, should be sure not to miss the current Soulpepper production especially since it is directed, as was the TfT production, by Diana Leblanc, who has such a deep knowledge of this play.  Marie-Lou is one of the great plays of Canadian drama and it is doubtful that one will see another production as gripping or insightful as this one is.  Canadian drama seldom tries to scale the heights of tragedy and seldom reaches those heights with confidence.  Tremblay’s Marie-Lou is one of the few Canadian plays that does make the attempt and succeeds with devastating power.

©Christopher Hoile

*In 1972 John Van Burek translated the play as Forever Yours, Marie-Lou.  Linda Gaboriau’s 2015 translation has changed the English title to Yours Forever, Marie-Lou.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Patricia Marceau, Geneviève Dufour, Suzanne Roberts Smith and Christian Laurin;Suzanne Roberts Smith as Carmen Geneviève Dufour as Manon. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.