Alienation inspires new play
Francophone, anglophone companies team up in groundbreaking production
What compels a man to storm a seat of government, determined to kill anyone in his way?
That’s the question at the heart of Les Passants, the thought-provoking but funny new play written by Luc Moquin, a former resident of Gatineau’s Aylmer sector, in a groundbreaking collaboration between two Ottawa theatre companies: the Great Canadian Theatre Company and Théâtre la Catapulte.
It’s the first time that francophone and anglophone theatre organizations in Ottawa have joined forces on a production. Although the play is performed in French, surtitles projected above the stage make it accessible to Englishspeaking audiences, too.
The spark for Moquin’s work was the Parliament Hill shooting of 2014. In the program notes, Moquin writes how the incident made him wonder “how someone can feel so utterly alienated by the world around him.”
The play explores the issue, but not in a straight line that connects A to B. Instead, Moquin draws from the tradition of absurdist theatre to combine comedy, tragedy, love and death in a series of loosely connected vignettes depicting an array of mundane characters caught in apparently meaningless lives. How refreshing that neither politics nor religion are part of the story.
We meet people such as Adele and her non-committal, uncommunicative “caveman” of a boyfriend, a pair of comical office workers, a beer-drinking, TVwatching lout named Marc, and the nerdy Bertrand, whose girlfriends keep ducking out on him.
One of the central characters is an overcoat-wearing, briefcasetoting office worker who’s having an existential crisis in the middle of the day, suddenly tormented by the question: “What am I doing here?” And: “Where is my phone?” The title, Les Passants, refers to the passersby, including those who hurry past the overcoat man without noticing him, underscoring the uncomfortable reality of disconnection: We can live in a bustling city, yet pass each other in the street without a word or even a glance.
Another character rarely gets outdoors. She prefers to isolate herself in her apartment, to the extent that garbage is piling up and she’s wearing dirty laundry.
We also meet people who buy books they never read, and in one very funny scene involving a miniature grand piano and a mover, a woman buys a piano because she did a few scales once.
“I hear the piano just by looking at it,” she claims, before being distracted by the smell of baked goods.
Dysfunctional relationships of a romantic nature are also addressed, again with a humorous twist. Nathan and Judith, for example, are trying to solve their issues — resentment and suffocation — through interpretive dance, the choreography resulting in broad physical comedy and much laughter from the audience.
The set is well designed, with a backdrop consisting of a series of colourless floor-to-ceiling panels that can serve as doors, windows or even a widescreen television. They also provide a screen on which to project images that enrich the action on stage.
The lighting design is particularly inventive, whether the set is bathed in orange light or focused on a single, talking bulb. Yes, the light bulb speaks, one example of the clever and surprising sound effects throughout the play.
Under the perceptive direction of Catapulte’s Jean Stephane Roy, the cast of four is strong, well suited to the demands of a script that requires comedic chops as well as dramatic skills and no small amount of physicality.
The fact that it’s performed in French isn’t a huge obstacle for Anglos, although you have to read quickly and get used to dividing your attention between the surtitles and the stage.
Despite the bleak theme of social alienation, there’s a hopeful note, which is crystallized in one particularly riveting scene featuring the anguished overcoat man as he’s about to blow a fuse. The audience was dead silent, as if witnessing a moment of truth that hit close to home. In the theatre, if not in real life, the tension was diffused: All it took was a hug.
While it could have effectively ended there, the play continues with vignettes that supply comedic solutions to our collective ennui, including the interpretive dance segment. There’s also a bit of preaching as one character describes indifference as a “form of sleep” that can be alleviated with the right words, a good story or a “tickle in the right place.”
In the end, Les Passants offers all three. lsaxberg@postmedia.com