Archambault puts focus on memory
Playwright’s knack for combining tragedy with laughter lifts You Will Remember Me
François Archambault, one of Quebec’s foremost living playwrights, was just 12 at the time of the 1980 referendum, yet he has vivid memories of the night the results came in.
“My father was volunteering for the Parti Québécois,” he recalls over a coffee just across from Centaur Theatre, where the latest production of his most successful play so far opens next week. “He was out working for the PQ on the night of the referendum. I remember him coming back, and it’s the first time I saw my father cry.”
You Will Remember Me (Tu te souviendras de moi in the original version, which premièred at La Licorne in 2014) is all about remembering. And about forgetting. Its central character, Édouard, is a history professor who has vivid memories of the referendum, too. But his recall of more recent events is disintegrating under the onslaught of Alzheimer’s.
It doesn’t sound like the stuff of comedy, but Archambault’s knack for combining painful tragedy with laughter is partly what lifts the play from being what he calls “a disease play.” In fact, that dramatic strategy is there in the very title, which came to him after listening to a jolly ’60s song.
“Tu te souviendras de moi was a very popular song in the ‘yé-yé’ style,” says Archambault. “People from Édouard’s generation would have known it well. What I like about the song is that the lyrics are very sad but the music is upbeat. I treated the play a bit like that: it’s a heavy subject, but I didn’t want to overwhelm the audience. I wanted to find a way to make it a little bit light, put a bit of humour in it.”
Director Roy Surette agrees about this aspect of Archambault’s style, which was in evidence in his most recent play for La Licorne, the darky comic murder mystery Une mort accidentelle, which ended last week.
“François often shows the dark side of people’s behaviour in a blackly comic way,” Surette explains over the phone between rehearsals. “In You Will Remember Me, the family are having to deal with this recent affliction affecting the father. It takes everyone into a kind of tailspin in which, yes, there certainly is some humour.”
But, says Surette, “there’s also something almost Lear-like about Édouard. He’s got a great big ego and he’s very accomplished, and for somebody who has had that much power, to have everything slipping away from him is very difficult for him and for those around him.”
(This is Surette’s last production before he leaves his post as Centaur boss in June. The irony of the title isn’t lost on him.)
What seems to have struck a chord with audiences, not just in Quebec but all over Canada, is the way the play uses Alzheimer’s as a metaphor to talk about wider political issues.
“The phrase ‘Je me souviens’ often came to mind,” explains Archambault. “So I was circling around all these ideas about memory and history, but I didn’t know where to start. Then I had the idea that the main character should be a history teacher. There was an irony in having someone for whom memory was so important finally losing his own memory.”
The play also suggests Quebec is suffering from its own form of memory loss, a process that was encapsulated for Archambault during an encounter with some francophone CEGEP students.
“They were performing a play I’d written about the ’95 referendum (Si la tendance se maintient). I asked them what they knew about René Lévesque, and they didn’t know him at all. It was a shock.”
Despite this, Archambault believes memories of Lévesque’s heroic defeat still haunt Quebec,
just as they haunt his play’s tragic hero.
“I think there is a wound from the referendum of 1980,” he says, “more so than the 1995 one, because of its link to René Lévesque, who was such a mythical figure. Most sovereignists feel he was very sincere in the way he went about things, staying aware of not going too fast, avoiding dishonest strategies to get his goal. I’ve talked to people who were there in 1980, hearing Lévesque’s speech, and they felt we missed our meeting with history. That’s why I decided to make the main character a witness to this moment.”
Also open for business next
week is Soulpepper’s original stage version of Kim’s Convenience, which was adapted into the hit CBC sitcom about a Korean family-run store in Toronto’s Regent Park.
Ins Choi’s touching, sometimes abrasive comedy began life on the Toronto Fringe before going on to become, in Soulpepper’s production, one of Canadian theatre’s biggest success stories. Jean Yoon and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee — who play Umma and Appa, or mom and pop, in the TV series — are reprising their roles in Soulpepper’s touring revival,
which reaches Segal’s stage on Wednesday.
Speaking to the Montreal Gazette from Toronto, Yoon explains that there are considerable differences between the stage and TV versions, particularly in terms of her character.
“The television series is set about 15 years before the stage version, and the Umma in that series is much lighter. She’s been expanded, she’s got way more interaction with the other characters, whereas the play is mostly about the father and the daughter. My character in the stage play is at a time in her life when she feels everything has fallen apart, where everything she hoped for for her children hasn’t come to pass. In some ways, the TV series and the stage play are like alternate universes.”
Whatever the differences between the two versions, the new and ever-expanding fan base turning up at the theatres is clearly far from disappointed.
“Paul has been in the stage show about 400 times, me around the 240 range, and it’s only since the television series that we come out after the show and there are all these fans waiting, sometimes with printed photos which they want us to sign, sometimes wanting selfies.
It’s really amazing to see such an enthusiastic response to a Canadian work about an Asian family.”
For Yoon, who once started her own theatre company, Loud Mouth Asian Babes, out of frustration over the limited opportunities for Asian actors, this is a pleasantly startling development. “As someone who’s worked in Canadian theatre for my entire life, it’s unprecedented.”
Festival de Casteliers, that feast
of puppetry for old and young alike, returns for its 12th edition next week, with performances from as far afield as Russia, Slovenia and France taking place across the city.
Highlights include Bolshoi Puppet Theatre’s Loin d’ici, an adult-oriented re-reading of Hans Christian Andersen (Théâtre Outremont, 1248 Bernard Ave. W., Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.); the Frankie Award-winning Beaver Dream from Montreal’s Lost and Found Puppet Co. (MainLine Theatre, 3997 St-Laurent Blvd., March 11 at 4 p.m.); and Schweinehund, the true story of a gay Frenchman’s persecution by the Nazis, from U.S. puppeteer Andy Gaukel (Théâtre Outremont, March 11 at 8:30 p.m.).
For more information about the festival, call 514-270-7779 or visit festival.casteliers.ca.