Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Pierre Corneille, adapted and directed by Gabriel Plante
Création dans la chambre, Théâtre du Trillium et La Chapelle, La Nouvelle Scène Gilles Desjardins, Ottawa
November 29-December 1, 2018
Don Diègue: “Rodrigue, as-tu du coeur?”
Gabriel Plante’s production of Pierre Corneille’s seminal masterpiece Le Cid (1637) proves that Québécois directors are just as good at indulging in Regietheater to make nonsense of the classics as other practitioners around the world of this inflated director-oriented style. Unlike a typical production of a play, Plante’s production of Le Cid, is not an interpretation of the text. Rather, it uses the text and the relationships of the characters at their most basic to create a critique of the play itself. The result is so bizarre that only someone who has previously read Le Cid, or better yet who has studied the play, will have any clue what is happening. Plante’s production is wholly absorbed in presenting as a new revelation the view of life Shakespeare had Macbeth express in 1606, as “a tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”.
The point of providing a synopsis of Corneille’s original play is to indicate to those who don’t know it the story what Plante has decided to omit from his production. The focus of the story set in 11th century Spain is the love between Don Rodrigue, son of Don Diègue, and Chimène, daughter of Le Comte, Don Gomès. The Infante, daughter of the King of Spain, is also in love with Don Rodrigue, but knows she can never marry him because of his low rank. Therefore, she tries to encourage love between Don Rodrigue and Chimène to extinguish her passion.
Difficulties arise when a fight ensues between Don Diègue and Don Gomès, with the latter grievously insulting the former. Don Diègue asks his son to avenge his honour by challenging Don Gomès to a duel. He does so and kills Don Gomès, thus becoming the murderer of his beloved’s father. Before Don Rodrigue and Chimène can resolve the strain on their relationship, the Moors attack Seville. Don Rodrigue leads Castile to victory and acquires the name “Le Cid” (from the Arabic “sayyid” for “lord”). In the end the King tells Chimène that Don Rodrigue’s actions are a worthy substitute for any attempt by her to avenge herself on the young hero for her father’s murder and the two agree to wait a year before marrying.
What is notable about the play is that the debate surrounding it set up the rules for the form and content of French neoclassical drama that would hold for all serious plays in France from 1637 up to the 20th century. It’s hard to think of any one play that has had that much influence on the drama of a nation for so long a time. In England even Shakespeare was rejected as a model from the Restoration through the 18th century.
Besides this, Corneille created the high, noble language in which his characters could express with complete lucidity their conflicts between duty and desire. It is because of Le Cid’s importance and because of its belief that language is equal to the expression of complex emotions that a director like Plante would find the the play so attractive to destroy. To a non-Francophone attacking Pierre Corneille seems totally insignificant. But to a Francophone it is like attacking the fons et origo of one’s dramatic culture.
In promoting the production, Plante’s goal is quite clear: “Par un processus de décontextualisation l’auteur et metteur en scène Gabriel Plante, présente le récit du Cid sous un angle inattendu. Ici, les vers classiques sont un enchaînement de sons et la réalité est traversée par le doute” (“By a process of decontextualization author and stage director Gabriel Plante takes an unexpected tack on the story of Le Cid. Here the classic lines become a sequence of sounds and reality is infused with a sense of unease.”) Thus one cannot accuse the production of false advertising. One can accuse it of making virtually no sense whatsoever.
When we enter the theatre we are engulfed in so much stage smoke that even sitting in the front row a person cannot see across the stage. When the smoke begins to clear we see the stage is covered with about twelve tripods holding short arms tipped with halogen lamps while three or four hand-held mics lie on the floor. Odile Gamache’s set has two levels. On the upper level sits a young woman in gold-brocade dress surrounded by books, skulls, cards, candles and other paraphernalia to suggest she is indulging in some sort of magic. Immediately below her is a white, fluorescent-lit cube, open at opposite ends, where a young man and woman embrace while sitting on modern chairs while an older man lies on the ground. All four are dressed in 17th-century period costume, except that they are barefoot and each is wearing modern earphones on their ears or around their necks.
As soon as the smoke dissipates enough to see, the lights go out. We then here a an odd “D-d-d-d” sound. We first think it might be part of Jacques Poulin-Denis’s abstract soundtrack, but as the lights slowly rise again we see it is coming from the woman in the gold-brocade dress, Élisabeth Smith, who is playing what Plante calls “Plutôt l’Infante” (or “sort of the Infante). With much whining and wailing she forces herself to splutter out the word “Don”. Finally when she starts to stutter on an ‘r’, those who know Corneille’s play will foresee that Plante’s Infante is trying to move on to “Rodrigue”. Stuttering a French ‘r’, of course, gives the impression that the Infante is trying to generate a lot of saliva for a good spit, but when she finally forces her way through both words she keeps repeating them with much travail until we wonder if that is going to make up the entire play. The Infante manages to let herself down to the white cube and slither under the chair that Rodrigue (Jocelyn Pelletier), or rather ““Plutôt Rodrigue”, is sitting on without noticing him or that he is busy kissing Chimène (Amélie Dallaire), or rather “Plutôt Chimène”.
Then, however, we hear a “sh-sh-sh-sh” coming from the white cube and think, “Oh good. Someone is trying to shut up the Infante”. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the actor Gaétan Nadeau, who plays all the Vieux Hommes (“old men’) in the play. Which old man he is at this moment we have no idea. Sadly, his character is not trying to shush the Infante, but is also given to stuttering, in this case trying to speak the name of Rodrigue’s beloved “Chimène”.
Anyone who thought listening to Smith as the Infante grated on the nerves, will not be prepared for the extraordinary excesses Nadeau takes in demonstrating the difficulty his Vieux Homme has in pronouncing “Chimène”. From growling, coughing and retching to apparently trying to imitate whale song, Nadeau seems use every form of verbal sound production in the Vieux Homme’s struggle to say the name. Unlike Smith, however, who was able to make the Infante’s stuttering appear to be due to intense grief, Nadeau tends to give the impression of an actor showing off just how outré he can be.
When Rodrigue and Chimène also begin their first lines with severe stutters, we wonder if Plante’s idea was to imagine that the entire cast of Le Cid had suffered strokes and were thus struggling to communicate despite their aphasia. Yet, anyone who read the précis for the production will remember that Plante’s goal is to reveal that “les vers classiques sont un enchaînement de sons et la réalité est traversée par le doute”. Thus, all this stuttering is part of his turning classical verse into a mere sequence of sounds, or in effect, nonsense. All the agonized noises the four actors produce while trying to speak is then to show that “la réalité est traversée par le doute”.
That might be satisfying up to a point, but Plante has allowed this struggle of the four to pronounce the names “Rodrigue” and “Chimène” almost a third of the 70 minutes Plante devotes to Corneille’s five-act play. It also turns out that Plante’s stylistic technique is not even consistent in its own terms. Just after Nadeau’s unknown Vieux Homme has made a virtuoso performance of demonstrating his inability to speak, Nadeau rushes off stage and then on again playing two of the Vieux Hommes, le Comte and Don Diègue having their fateful argument. Since Nadeau plays both he states the name of the character before speaking the lines, this time with no difficulty.
So which is it? Are Corneille’s famous lines merely a sequence of sounds or do they actually mean something? Why does Plante have his characters spend so much time struggling to form words one minute and then have them speak perfectly well another? Part of Plante’s interpretation is to demonstrate the terrible hold that the old have over the young in Le Cid, but if that is so, why does Plante have Rodrigue’s pantaloons fall down (remember, this is not funny but very serious) revealing his modern black boxer briefs underneath so that he is dressed just like Gaétan Nadeau as Les Vieux Hommes?
Plante gives us an Infante to is not a model of self-sacrificing virtue and a Don Rodrigue who is no hero but a drivelling idiot. Les Vieux Hommes do not represent a spectrum of attributes but are all malign and Chimène is perfectly patient rather than severely torn between love and duty. Plante has discarded the vast majority of Corneille’s verse and has not so much decontextualized as obliterated Corneille’s plot.
Corneille is seldom staged in Ontario. All Stratford has managed in 66 years is L’Illusion comique (1636) in 1993 and Le Menteur (1643) in 2006, both comedies and both atypical of an author known for stretching the boundaries of tragedy. Corneille’s Horace (1640) about a man more devoted to military rule than human emotion and Cinna (1641) about the Emperor Augustus who decides to take a step away from tyranny would both have a strong resonance today. It therefore an enormous pity that this rare chance to see Le Cid should be so deformed by a director’s willfulness, especially when he has a cast so committed to fulfilling his ideas and so imaginative a creative team.
The main flaw with Plante’s approach is that it is not really specific to Corneille’s Le Cid at all. A director could decide to choose to stage only about one twentieth of any great play from Oedipus to Waiting for Godot, decontextualize it and have characters struggle to pronounce the names of the characters for nearly a quarter of its running time, finishing with a few select non-chronologically staged scenes and turn it into merely “un enchaînement de sons”. Any word can be repeated to the point of meaninglessness.
Plante’s approach is, in fact, so general that that it actually tells us nothing about Le Cid nor about drama in general. Nevertheless, confronted with such an obvious abuse of directorial privilege, theatre critics in Montreal, where this production premiered, were loath to point out that the emperor had no clothes and instead praised Plante’s production as “primal” (Le Devoir), “iconoclastique” (Jeu: Revue de Théâtre) and “une réflexion transcendante sur la répétition” (Avant-Première). To its credit the Ottawa audience watched this debacle with only mildly suppressed derision and accorded it the most lukewarm applause possible.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Élizabeth Smith as the Infante and Jocelyn Pelletier as Don Rodrigue; Jocelyn Pelletier as Don Rodrigue, head of Élizabeth Smith as the Infante and Amélie Dallaire as Chimène; Gaétan Nadeau as one of Les Vieux Hommes. ©2018 Hugo B. Lefort.
For tickets, visit www.nouvellescene.com/spectacles/le-cid
2018-12-03
Le Cid