Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✭✩
by Michel Tremblay, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Gordon McCall
Centaur Theatre / Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
April 13-May 13, 2000
“A Pleasure Indeed”
In 1998, on a commission from the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montreal to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his breakthrough play, “Les Belles-Soeurs”, Michel Tremblay wrote a play to celebrate his mother as his mentor. The play was “Encore une fois, si vous permettez” (literally, “One more time, if you allow me”) or as the title of the lively English translation of Linda Gaboriau has it, “For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again”. The production currently playing in Toronto is the product of the first-ever collaboration of the English-language Centaur Theatre in Montreal and the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto. Toronto is the final stop in a six-city Canadian tour and in September the production will move to Washington, D.C. for play’s U.S. première as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations for the Arena Theatre.
Celebration, indeed, is the key word in describing this play and its effect. The character called the Narrator (a not even thinly-disguised version of Tremblay himself) begins by telling the audience what kind of play they will NOT see. Through clever allusions we see that it will not be a Greek tragedy, or one by Racine or Shakespeare, or one of Tennessee Williams’ more dispiriting dramas or even one of those depressing absurdist plays with people in trashcans. This will be a celebration of a woman who has lived in all places and times. She could have been the aunt or niece or cousin of one of the central figures of a tragedy, but she is not a tragic figure herself. Although she was his main inspiration in writing plays through her own love of the theatre, she never saw how the theatre works from behind the scenes and she never lived to see her son’s success. She died five years before the première of “Les Belles-Soeurs”.
Given the Narrator’s stated parameters, we also should not expect a typical play by Tremblay--there will be no drag queens, no incest, no murder, no degradation. Instead, the play he gives us is very warm-hearted, filled with abundant humour and more than a little sentimental--quite in keeping with the tastes of its central subject. Dennis O’Connor, the Narrator, also plays the playwright at various ages from ten to twenty-eight in a series of encounters with his mother, Nana, marvellously played by Nicola Cavendish. Through these encounters we see how Nana’s love of words, story-telling, exaggeration and the effect these all have on others become the prime influence on the Narrator in choosing his vocation as writer.
She herself says that she exaggerates to keep from getting bored and that without telling stories she could not get through life. The stories she tells her son about his Aunt Gertrude, Uncle Alfred and cousin Lucille are hilarious. She also tells stories to fill for the education she has missed as when she tries to explain to her son how kings came to be kings by divine intervention. She loves literature because it transforms reality. She knows that she wonders what an actress does when she is not acting and wonders if an actress wonders what she or any audience member does when they are not watching her. Although not educated, philosophical questions like this occur to her about how the actor and audience exist in relation to each other. From daily exposure to this kind of exploring mind, constantly entertaining itself and others, another lover of words and stories grows up.
As the Narrator, Dennis O’Connor is quite engaging. I found his impersonations of the son from ages ten to sixteen not especially effective and not particularly differentiated from each other. As the son from age eighteen on, however, he was very fine, although his role really is only to serve as a foil to Nana. As Nana, Nicola Cavendish gives a performance I don’t expect ever to see bettered. She has invested her character with a wide range of gestures, inflections and habits all her own. All of these are scaled to the various ages when we see her character--from the full vitality of her younger years--ranting, playful, tired, exasperated, satirical--to the year when she learns of the cancer that seems to make a mockery of her love of being a mother, as if she were pregnant with her own death, as she puts it.
All these interactions occur on the minimalist set of John C. Dinning, sensitively lit by Louise Guinand consisting only of a table, two chairs, two narrow black walls against a black backdrop. I do not wish to reveal the ending in which Dinning’s full abilities are made apparent, but let me say that the Narrator does not wish our last view of his mother to be of her filled with pain, worry and fear of death. Instead, the Narrator calls upon the “magic of the theatre” to let his mother see the theatre in a way she never had the chance to and to send her off in a manner befitting the inspiration she gave him. His celebration of his mother thus becomes a celebration of the theatre.
The director, Gordon McCall, Artistic Director of the Centaur Theatre, expertly manages the action and changes of mood. It is possible that he does not linger long enough on the more serious aspects of the piece and is too quick to cut to a laugh, but at least, he lets us see that a serious undercurrent is there. In the end, the play’s success or failure depends almost entirely on the actor playing Nana. Nicola Cavendish makes the role and play a triumph.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Dennis O’Connor and Nicola Cavendish. ©1998 Gordon McCall.
2000-05-02
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again