Yours
Forever, Marie-Lou is Michel
Tremblay’s frightful portrait of a working class family in the 1960s in Quebec.
Diana Leblanc has directed a pitch-perfect production for Soulpepper that
captures every nuance of the play. This is theatre at its best.
This
marvelous play works simultaneously on two solitudes. A husband and a wife are
sitting on raised couches on each side of the stage exchanging barbs rooted in
deep-seated hatred and disappointment. There is a crucifix behind Marie-Lou
(Patricia Marceau) as she sits knitting throughout the play. Her husband
Léopold (Christian Laurin) has bottles of beers in front of him and a steering
wheel hangs behind him. He is a machine operator, friendless and full of
bitterness and resentment.
Patricia
Marceau, Geneviève Dufour, Suzanne Roberts Smith & Christian Laurin. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
Their
daughters are on the stage below the parents and they are in the present day
while their parents’ actions took place ten years before. Carmen (Suzanne
Roberts Smith) and Manon (Geneviève Dufour) are the products and indeed the
victims of the corrosive atmosphere in the family.
Leblanc
directs a first rate-cast that brings this pathetic family to life in all its
horrors. Marceau as Marie-Lou is sympathetic and pitiable. She is the victim of
a religious morality imposed on her that makes sex a duty to be endured
occasionally for procreation. Her husband practically rapes her on the few
times that they have intercourse and she lives in a closed world where knitting
seems to be her primary preoccupation. An outstanding portrayal.
Laurin is
equally effective as Léopold, the machine operator who identifies himself with
his machine. He has no other world except that of drinking excessively and
warring with his wife. He has sex and impregnates his wife against her will and
in the end he realizes that he has absolutely nothing to live for.
The two
daughters review events that happened ten years before. Manon has become a copy
of her mother, right down to her clothes. She is trapped in the same morality
with holy water and crucifixes as the central themes of her life. Dufour’s portrayal
of this pathetic woman is superb.
Carmen has
found an escape route. Smith comes dressed in a cowboy hat, a blonde wig,
cowboy boots and the paraphernalia of a country western singer that has much
more to do with sexual appeal than anything else. She is the type of woman her
father would have gawked at. This, anything it seems, is better than the
suffocating and acidic world of her parents and her sister.
The actors
speak with a slight indication of a joual
accent that is perfect. The accent locates the play in Quebec without making
the characters sound like Quebecois speaking a foreign language. Pitch-perfect.
That is
one of the touches by Leblanc who captures every detail as the play builds up to the tragic end for all the members of that sad
family.
The set by
Glen Charles Landry shows, as I said, the parents on raised couches. There are
parts of cars in the background that will eventually make sense. The atmosphere
is unpleasant, to say the least, and the set is a perfect reflection of the
lives of the characters.
The play
was originally translated by Bill Glassco and John Van Burek for its first
English language production at the Tarragon Theatre. The current production is
in a new translation by Linda Gaboriau, the dean of Canadian translators. Those
with long memories will recall that the first translation was called Forever
Yours, Marie-Lou.
It is a
must-see production of a landmark Canadian play.
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