✭✭✭✭✩

written by Michel Tremblay, directed by Barbara Larose

Alumnae Theatre, Toronto

November 21-December 6, 2003

The Real World? (Le Vrai Monde?) from 1987 may not be Tremblay's best-known play, but the gripping Alumnae Theatre production reveals it as one of his most powerful works.  Set in a single room in Montreal in 1965, the play shows us Claude and two versions of his family--his real family and the same family in as they appear in the play he has just written.  Though Family I (real) and Family II (fictional) inhabit the same space, the two do not interact.  Rather, Tremblay constantly forces us to compare the two to understand why Claude's real mother, who has read the play, feels Claude has so betrayed and humiliated her.  This is not an empty postmodern exercise.  Instead, Tremblay earnestly examines the tragedy of the writer compelled to expose the hateful secrets of his world even at the cost of incurring exile from it.

Director Barbara Larose has drawn such finely detailed, highly naturalistic performances from the whole cast that, sitting in the Alumnae's intimate upstairs space, we feel like voyeurs watching a family's most painful encounters.  Josh Bloch captures Claude's mixture of weakness, pain, love and anger so well it's impossible not to be moved by his anguish.   The contrast between Family I and Family II is best expressed by Andy Fraser Watts as Claude's "real" mother Madeleine I, who is proud to suffer her loutish husband's unfaithfulness in silence, versus Dinah Watts as Madeleine II, who is poised and articulate in her direct verbal attacks on him.  The tension never lets up as Larose guides the action to its devastating conclusion. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-11-27.

Photo: Dinah Watts. ©2003 Alumnae Theatre.