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by Michel Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek & Bill Glassco, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

May 2-June 3, 2012

“Three Characters Found by an Author Against Their Will”

The Real World? (Le Vrai Monde?) from 1987 may not be one of Michel Tremblay’s most famous plays, but it is certainly one of his very best.  The Tarragon Theatre’s current production is the first professional production of the play in Ontario since the Tarragon first staged it in 1988 and revived it in 1989.  The new Tarragon amply demonstrates that given the fundamental questions it raises and the vivid characters it portrays, The Real World? has a firm place in the canon of great Canadian drama.    

In The Real World? Tremblay confronts the issue most writers face of having based fictional characters on real people.  American playwright Donald Margulies dealt with this subject in Collected Stories (1996), which became a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, but Tremblay’s play is much more incisive and infinitely more theatrically inventive.

It is Montreal in 1965 and Claude (Matthew Edison), an alter-ego for Tremblay, is an angry young man who has just written his first play.  Claude’s mother Madeleine (Jane Spidell) has been longing to read her son’s work but is outraged to discover that not only is the subject Claude’s own family but he has not even changed their names.  As mother and son discuss the play, we see scenes from it enacted in the very same lower middle-class living room inhabited by the “real” characters.  In the text Tremblay adds the numeral “1” after the names of the “real” characters and a “2” after the characters who appear in Claude’s play.  Thus, Claude’s “real” mother is “Madeleine 1” while the character based on her in Claude’s play is “Madeleine 2”.

Madeleine 1 is furious that Claude has used his play as a means of staging scenes between her and her male chauvinist husband Alex 1 (Tony Nappo) that never happened and that she has deliberately prevented from ever happening.  Madeleine 1 knows that her husband, a travelling insurance salesman, has had other women and has even had a child by one of them.  To preserve peace at home and the family’s reputation in the neighbourhood she has never confronted him with his infidelities, whereas Claude has Madeleine 2 (Meg Tilly) and Alex 2 (Cliff Saunders) fly into a raging, no-holds-barred argument about them. 

This family secret that Claude reveals in his play pales in comparison with his accusation that Alex 1 had an unhealthy relationship with his sister Mariette 1 (Sophie Goulet).  Claude’s play suggests that Alex 1 would actually have sexually assaulted Mariette1 if he had not intervened just before his mother returned home.

The prime fascination of the play is to contrast Claude’s “real” family with the characters based on them.  What we see is that Claude’s version of the truth does not have the same complexity as reality.  Alex 1 may be a lout and womanizer, but he does appear truly to love his wife in a way that Alex 2 does not.  Mariette 1, a go-go dancer, is certainly not the innocent young thing Claude depicts as Mariette 2 (Cara Gee), and Mariette 1 is still inordinately affectionate with her father whereas Mariette 2 accuses Alex 2 for being a pervert by taking his friends to watch her dance wherever she has a gig.  Claude’s real family are not so easily identified as tyrant, martyr and innocent as their equivalents in his play. 

Designer Charlotte Dean has captured the dreariness, despite the influence of Danish Modern, in her detailed interior of the family home.  Her costumes for the fictional family cleverly suggest but do not duplicate the accurate period costumes of the “real” family.  Kevin Fraser’s lighting changes from naturalistic for the scenes involving only the “real” characters to more consciously theatrical when the fictional characters hold the stage. 

Director Richard Rose has well managed the blocking so that the two families have free passage through the room without ever acknowledging each other.  The proscenium of Dean’s set is set back from the each of the stage so that there is a narrow strip of paying area in front of it.  Here Rose occasionally has Claude step out of the stage set and regard the action.  This deliberate breaking of the fourth wall has a highly significant effect.  It means that Rose is not merely staging Tremblay’s play The Real World? but, in fact, is staging what the play represents – that is, Tremblay’s dealing with the problem of appropriating the lives of others for fiction and the contrast of illusion and reality by means of writing a play-within-a-play.  Claude’s breaking the fourth wall thus makes us view the action as a play-within-a-play-within-a-play.  As if this were not enough, Rose hammers this point home with a highly theatrical if heavy-handed effect about three-fourths of the way through the action which we reviewers have been asked not to describe.

Matthew Edison is excellent as the sullen, alienated Claude, who doesn’t accept any criticism of himself or his play.The two actors who really shine are Jane Spidell and Meg Tilly as the two Madeleines.  Spidell has become renowned for the intensity of her portrayals, but I don’t think I have ever seen a more powerful depiction of controlled rage as the Spidell conveys it in an incandescent performance.  Claude does not depict his mother as she is but as he would like her to be.  Meg Tilly flies at her husband in a completely uncontrolled rage, nearly hysterical with humiliation she has suffered, in a performance of raw power. 

Richard Rose does not make the distinction between the two Alexes quite as clear.  Tony Nappo shows Alex 1 to be an old fashioned male chauvinist who regards his wife as a servant and has no notion of what “art” is and doesn’t want to.  Yet, he is not so stupid as Claude makes him out to be.  As Alex 2, Cliff Saunders, in a rare non-comic turn, is an ignorant, offensive brute who comes close to resorting to violence to stop his wife’s stream of invective.  If there is a difficulty with Rose’s direction, aside from his unnecessarily secret special effect, it is that he has Tilly and Saunders begin on too extreme a note so that they have very room to expand their conflict.

The two Mariettes make a fine contrast.  Claude’s scene for Mariette 2 is completely invented and shows her coming home to tell off her father for his perverted ways.  Gee fills the character with all the moral indignation Claude gives her.  Mariette 1, however, seems still to be her daddy’s little girl and doesn’t seem to mind flirting as her daddy’s big girl.  The “real” Mariette and Alex appear to have formed a bond of shared interests to counter the bond between Claude and Madeleine 1.  Sophie Goulet well conveys her character’s unconsciously sluttish behaviour and help to give the play welcome touches of comedy.

The theatrical originality and fluidity of the play will be an eye-opener for those who think of Tremblay’s innovations only in terms of the static assemblage of contrasting voices found in Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (1970) or Albertine in Five Times (1984).  Anyone with an interest in Canadian drama, or simply in modern drama, who has never seen The Real World? must see this Tarragon production that glows red hot with the cast’s inspired performances.             

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Jane Spidell, Meg Tilly, Matthew Edison and Cliff Saunders. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.