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by Albert Camus, directed by Karine Ricard

Théâtre français de Toronto, The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto

November 5-15, 2025

La Mère: “Il est plus facile de tuer ce qu’on ne connaît pas”

Le Théâtre français de Toronto has done theatre-lovers a great favour by giving them a rare chance to see Le Malentendu by Albert Camus. The play first produced in 1944 is more often read than seen, but the brilliant TfT production proves that the play is thoroughly gripping from start to finish. With its insightful direction and highly detailed performances Le Malentendu is a production that should not be missed.

One of many reasons why Le Malentendu (“The Misunderstanding”) is so important is that it is one several attempts in the mid-20th century to create write a modern tragedy. An ironic attitude has been so in vogue for the past 50 years that thoughts of creating modern tragedy as a viable form of theatre have all but vanished. Yet, Camus’s play, like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), demonstrate that the public still responds to this ancient genre.

While Salesman and Le Malentendu are both tragedies, they portray the tragic in very different ways. In Salesman the title character comes to realize that all the ideals that guided his life are illusions. In Le Malentendu, tragedy derives not from a loss of ideals but from the wilful suppression of human feelings. The three main characters create rigid rules of behaviour for themselves that they would rather preserve than break, even when breaking the rules would be to their advantage.

Le Malentendu is set in an isolated inn far from the sea. The visitors it receives stop by mostly to see the cloisters nearby. We meet the Mother and her daughter Martha who run the inn. They are currently looking forward to the arrival of a young man from another country who plans to stay only one night. This we realize is their ideal target since their habit has been to drug young foreign men without families, rob them and throw them in the nearby river where they drown. The Mother complains that she is too tired and too old to do this anymore, but Martha insists because with one more theft they will be able to move from the interior of their unnamed country to live on the coast where Martha can finally enjoy the sea, the sun and a feeling of freedom.

We next meet Jan, the young man the Mother and Martha have been discussing and discover that the Mother is Jan’s mother and Martha his sister. He plans to stay at the inn in attempt to reunite with the two women whom he hasn’t seen for 20 years. He left the two when he was 13 to escape and find a better life, knowing that his departure would make their lives worse. Now he is happy, married and financially secure and feels it is time to re-establish contact. If he sees his mother and sister need his help, he is now in a position to help them.

Maria does not want him to go alone, since they never have been apart since they married, and she especially does not want him to stay there incognito as he plans to do. He reasons that he must do this because he needs to discover how his mother and sister feel about the son that abandoned them and never communicated with them once in 20 years. He also wants to discover whether they do or do not need his help without having to ask them directly.

Jan’s argument prevails and he does check into the inn for one night under a false name. The Mother and Martha notice immediately that he is not like other clients in that Jan asks them so many personal questions. Martha in particular wants to remain on the strictly business footing of hotel guest and innkeeper. There is no reason why she should be friends with someone who is staying in the hotel only one night.

Jan find Martha’s strictness forbidding but amusing while the Mother is increasing drawn to the stranger. Jan, in turn, is drawn to Martha and his Mother, and finds it odd that both of them keep playing up the deficiencies of the inn, seemingly encouraging him to leave. Generating an ever-growing tenson is the question whether Jan, Martha or his Mother will break from the plans they have made and thus save themselves.

Jan realizes he misses Maria so much he no longer wants to stay at the inn. The Mother wants to call the project off because she is too tired to carry it through. Even Martha begins to soften in her attitude toward Jan, but, unfortunately, she sees that as only a reason to act quickly. As the Mother says, “Il est plus facile de tuer ce qu’on ne connaît pas” (“It is easier to kill something you don’t know”). With Martha’s serving Jan the drugged tea, the play takes an unstappable turn toward tragedy.

The play has often been criticized for the improbability of its plot, yet on viewing the TfT production that notion never occurred to me while watching. The reason for this is that director Karin Ricard has understood that Camus’s story is much more symbolic than naturalistic. Given that the play is written by one of the world’s most famous existentialist philosophers, it should be no surprise that the play functions as an existentialist parable. Jan often mentions that he is like the “prodigal son” (Luke 15: 11-32), but Camus revises that story to give the prodigal son a very different homecoming.

To highlight the story as parable, Ricard has created a non-naturalistic staging. All the action takes place in a narrow space in front of a wall made up of 50 rectangular blocks of dark gray pitted stone five blocks high and ten blocks wide. Ricard and set designer John Doucet must have been inspired by the Mother’s words, “c’est déjà beaucoup si l’on a pu faire soi-même cette dérisoire maison de briques, meublée de souvenirs, où il arrive parfois que l’on s’endorme”.

The wall has two doors – one to the outside and one to the inside of the inn. As the action progresses, one panel after another is removed from the metal grid holding them together. One could say that gradually the barrier between the world of the play and the world outside it is dismantled.

Ricard has altered the text to make its effect more immediate. In the original, Martha assumes from his false name that he must be Czech. Jan says he was born in Africa but now lives in “Bohemia”. We thus assume that the inn is located somewhere in North Africa. In Camus, this difference between Europe and Africa is code for a difference between France and Algeria.

Ricard has revised this to have Jan give an Arabic name which leads Martha to assume he is Arabic. Ricard has relocated the inn to Iran as is evident before the play begins when we see Mehdi Rostami as Le Vieux Domestique playing music on a type of setar, an ancient Persian stringed instrument. Designer Melanie McNeill has created wonderful costumes composed of multiple layers that suggest a place somewhere between the Caucasus and the Arabian Sea without specifically identifying any one place.

This change of locale has the important effect of causing us to see a parallel between the strict rules that Jan and Martha have set for themselves and the strict ideologies so often evoked when speaking of this geographic area, even though people’s failure to communicate because of the ideologies they hold is found around the world. This gives the conflict in the play a modern political edge. Camus’s parable is about the tragedy of people who hold to an inflexible plan regarding the other rather than being flexible and adopting a new plan to suit the new circumstances.

In the play both Jan and the Mother are willing to give up their plans based on their personal experiences of each other. In both cases, their decision to change comes too late. It is Martha who is the most inflexible and has to fight her liking for Jan to complete her plan. Inevitably, Martha’s course also ends in tragedy.

Camus does not define the role of Le Vieux Domestique. His main characteristic in the original is his silence which he breaks only at the play’s end. In Ricard’s version this mysterious character is always present through his music. He plays his music both on stage and off which suggests his represents something that permeates the setting. If you carefully note his actions, you will see that he distracts Martha from looking at Jan’s passport which would have revealed his true identity right from the start. He tells Martha Jan has asked for tea when Jan has not done so. After Jan is knocked out, he filches Jan’s passport so the others can’t find it. And he delivers it to the Mother only when it will cause the greatest pain.

We could easily say Le Vieux Domestique represents Fate, except that Camus did not believe in Fate or anyhigher power. What Le Vieux Domestique thus really represents is metatheatrical. He is the mechanism of tragedy personified. Such an interpretation well suits a mise en scène which is already more symbolic than naturalistic.

The difficulty in presenting a play that is a parable is to make the characters appear independent of a schema and full of life. This is exactly what Ricard achieves with all four of the speaking characters. Ziad Ek is an especially lively Jan. Ek exudes so much happiness in his interactions with Maria we wonder with her why he would want to do anything that would upset their idyllic life together. Yet, even if Ek says nothing, he suggests that Jan is stricken with guilt for having abandoned his mother and sister without explanation.

When Jan is in the inn, Ricard allows Jan’s situation to develop into a type of grim comedy where Jan becomes ever more familiar with Martha and the Mother while familiarity is the last thing they want from a future victim. Ek well plays the part of an ordinary man confused by the strange behaviour of these innkeepers yet willing to forgive their eccentricity.

Christina Tannous is luminous as the Mother. She depicts the Mother as not merely tired of the deadly game she and Martha engage in but tired of a life that has lost all meaning. Tannous also indicates, however, how Jan’s arrival helps to bring her back to life. Tannous is also an opera singer and her passionate performances of the songs Rostami and Geneviève Cholette have written for her give us more feeling for the Mother’s inner life than do Camus’s words alone.

Béatrice René-Décarie presents Martha as the play’s most complex character displaying Martha’s battle of trying to preserve a professional distance from Jan, becoming ruder to Jan the more she comes to like him. At one of her weaker moments, Martha admits that having Jan around is like living by the sea, the goal she most seeks. At the same time, René-Décarie shows how any liking Martha feels immediately turns to hatred for her own weakness in not carrying out her murderous project. At the end when Martha so violently castigates Maria, René-Décarie depicts Martha venting her hatred of Jan and the world while simultaneously mourning the loss of everybody in the world who could have made her life worth living. In her rage René-Décarie makes Martha appear very like a female version of Meursault, the main character of Camus’s novel L’Étranger (1942), who when captured for committing a senseless murder states, “le jour de mon exécution et qu’ils m’accueillent avec des cris de haine”.

Jenny Brizard is a strong and passionate Maria, who fiercely argues against Jan’s plan to visit his relatives. Ricard gives Brizard a chance to demonstrate her background as a dancer by inserting a dream sequence in the play where Maria gracefully and seductively expresses her love for Jan, a sequence that vividly emphasizes, though too late, why Jan finally feels he should follow Maria’s advice.

As Le Vieux Domestique, Mehdi Rostami is a calm, inscrutable presence embodying no malice or enmity that one might identify with Fate but simply carrying out his duties to force the action into the course it must take. His wonderful playing imbues the entire production with the atmosphere of another place and time and thus plays a major role in our perception of the play as timeless fable.

What Ricard and TfT have achieved is a a major accomplishment. They have looked deeply into a contentious work by a great author and realized how it can best be presented. This thrilling, insightful production deserves to be seen by as large an audience as possible.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Béatrice René-Décarie as Martha and Ziad Ek as Jan with Mehdi Rostami in background; Béatrice René-Décarie as Martha, Christina Tannous as the Mother and Mehdi Rostami as Le Vieux Domestique; Jenny Brizard as Maria and Ziad Ek as Jan; Ziad Ek as Jan. © 2025 Mathieu Taillardas.

For tickets visit: www.theatrefrancais.com.