GROTESQUE FUN, HIPSTER CHIC ENLIVEN L’IDIOT
It’s tempting to say that even the notoriously gloomy Fyodor Dostoyevsky might have cracked a smile over all the stage time he’s been getting in Montreal lately (The Gambler and Notes From Underground at Théâtre Prospero, The Double at Hudson Village Theatre). Having said that, the Russian novelist’s miserabalist reputation is a bit unfair, as evidenced by the latest theatrical take on his work to hit town, namely TNM’s colourful, often viciously funny version of The Idiot — or L’idiot as it’s called in Étienne Lepage’s francophone adaptation, which plays to April 14.
The laughs literally arrive in the first few seconds, as Renaud Lacelle-Bourdon’s titular twit walks onto the stage, beams delightedly at the audience, then bangs his head on a speaker.
Of course, Prince Mychkine, played with sympathetic and, yes, amusing sweetness by Lacelle-Bourdon, isn’t really an idiot. He’s more of a holy fool, a Christ-like innocent whose artless attempts to raise a nest of socialites and hangers-on up from their selfish, self-destructive ways only ends up creating chaos, some of it entertainingly absurd, some of it tragic.
Lepage’s mostly lean and energetic script — there are a few longueurs in the second half when things get deadly serious — ably guides us through the complicated intrigues of the novel. These intrigues mostly involve “fallen woman” Nastassia (Evelyne Brochu), whose steely resistance to a “respectable” marriage leads to a terrific triple act between her venal but hapless matchmakers. There’s her abusive guardian Totski (Henri Chassé), his friend General Épanchine (Frédéric Blanchette), and Gania (Simon Lacroix), the hysterical milksop of a clerk lined up for her.
Nastassia’s magnificently defiant refusal — she first appears like a sun goddess depicted in the style of a Russian Orthodox icon — subsequently gets her caught up in a perverse love triangle between the saintly Mychkine and his dark opposite, the murderously obsessive Rogojine (played with heartsick intensity and sickening brutality by Francis Ducharme).
In director Catherine Vidal’s audaciously voguish production, Dostoyevsky’s late-19th-century milieu is transformed into a cartoonish fever dream of past and present, artifice and reality. Cha-cha-cha dance music plays at Mychkine’s masked birthday ball while the guests dance like embarrassing aunts and uncles among the balloons. Throughout the show, lighting designer Alexandre Pilon- Guay gets the lighting rigs dancing, too, swooping them over the stage or turning their glare away from the actors and onto the audience. Most dazzling, though, is Elen Ewing ’s remarkable costume designs, which sometimes hint at Tsarist Russia’s high society, but mostly have fun with exaggerated hipster chic, with characters dressed as if for
a carnivalesque catwalk.
There’s fun too in some of the peripheral characters, such as pathetic drunkard Lebedev, hilariously played with a bowlcut wig, a gruesome ’70s suit, and an almost acrobatic level of cringing by Paul Ahmarani. Macha Limonchik makes for an impressively austere matriarch with a ready store of cutting one-liners.
Paul Savoie is a treat every time he appears as the excruciating General Ivolgine, mortifying his offspring with obviously tall tales.
That he usually turns up in public sans trousers hints that the whole thing might be some kind of anxiety nightmare.
A mention too for Geneviève Lizotte’s set design, which makes clever reference to Dostoyevsky’s preoccupation with doppelgängers and split personalities. At first dominated by a convex wall of black marble shot through with white streaks, it turns itself into its own negative mirror image by the second half.