War crimes reverberate in Centaur’s Butcher
Family strife and war connect Butcher, Five Kings, Ils étaient tous mes fils
At a time of both optimism and trepidation over the inauguration of a new political dynasty, three productions are dealing with intergenerational strife and the sins of fathers being visited on their children.
The themes are clear and largely well-known enough in Arthur Miller’s postwar classic All My Sons, which is playing at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe as Ils étaient tous mes fils, and in Shakespeare’s history cycle, as distilled in Espace Go’s Five Kings. But I’ll have to be a little more circumspect in applying these themes to Butcher, which opens at the Centaur next week, and whose impact largely rests on twists and turns sharper than the meat hook found hanging around the main character’s neck in the opening scenes.
Set during a long, gruelling Christmas morning in a Toronto police station, Butcher begins with a policeman and a lawyer trying to figure out why an old man has been dumped on the doorstep wearing a military uniform and Santa hat, with a message demanding he be punished attached to the aforementioned hook. The fact that the message has been scrawled in a Balkan-style language is a hint that reverberations from faraway wars will soon be rippling through the humdrum cops’ office.
Butcher was written by Montreal-raised, Toronto-based playwright Nicolas Billon as a conscious nod to the Greek tragedies that have fuelled his work ever since his 2004 debut The Elephant Song (adapted into a film starring Xavier Dolan last year), which explored the impact a father’s violent act has on his son’s development.
“There’s no question that Butcher is influenced by what I’d almost call my obsession with Greek drama,” Billon said in a phone interview. “The format is one of the best ways to have conversations about the really big questions. Greek dramas are often about the relationship of humans to the gods. Butcher isn’t quite about that, but I’ve tried to make it a conversation on that scale, to really ask big, uncomfortable questions about the difficulties, say, of setting up the International Criminal Court and dealing with war criminals.”
If that makes Butcher sound like a worthy but depressing evening at the theatre, it should be noted that it’s delivered with a streak of dark comedy and muscular, thriller-like plotting that makes for a furiously entertaining play. A testament to its impact on audiences is the fact that it currently has several productions playing across Canada.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the play is its occasional recourse to an invented language, painstakingly created by two linguists. The fictional country from which this language derives is Lavinia, a name chosen as a tribute to a character in Titus Andronicus. Which is ironic, since that bloodiest of plays is Billon’s least favourite Shakespeare. His dislike is a hint of his preferred method for handling extreme violence. Despite Butcher
being awash with savagery and bloody vengeance, it’s the very use of the Lavinian language that enabled Billon to avoid directly spilling it all at the audience’s feet.
“I would say that’s the main reason I wanted an invented language,” he explains. “There’s a moment in the play, a terrible confession, and I struggled with it. I wanted and I needed this confession to happen, but what I didn’t want was for it to become exploitative. I want it to be visceral, I want the violence of the act to be clear, but I don’t want the details of the act to be clear. I originally thought of using Esperanto, but philosophically, I really needed it to be all or nothing. In other words, if it was in Esperanto, the chances of somebody in the audience speaking it are close to zero, but not zero. So it had to
be an invented language so that nobody outside the world of this play would be able to understand what that man is saying.”
To avoid spoilers, it might have been preferable to write the following sentence in Lavinian; maybe just look away now if you want to preserve your innocence about Butcher. One of its main themes is the horrid stickiness of family blood ties, as well as a preoccupation with the terrible fallout of war. Both All My Sons and Five Kings, Olivier Kemeid’s new five-hour adaptation of Richards II and III and Henrys IV to VI, are rich in these preoccupations. So it’s surprising that Frédéric Dubois, the director of the two francophone productions, only became aware of the similarities once he started working on them.
As he explained over a coffee between rehearsals of All My Sons: “Five Kings is more a play about fathers and sons than it is about kings. With Shakespeare, the first impulse is to go into the politics, but when we decided to go with the father and son relations, it became more interesting for us. And then when I began work on All My Sons, I thought: My God, it’s the same thing, the same sensibility! And then there was the election with the Trudeau dynasty, but also the Bush and Clinton ones, which really brought both plays into focus.”
Five Kings has been given the subheading L’histoire de notre chute, and Dubois explains that he and Kemeid are using Shakespeare’s history cycle partly as a vehicle for exploring Quebec’s journey from optimistic idealism during the 1960s to what he sees as present-day disillusionment.
Although less explicitly violent than Butcher or Five Kings (which Dubois describes as moving from romantic deaths to full-on Tarantino-esque bloodshed), All My Sons nevertheless inches toward catastrophe with the concentrated inevitability of Greek tragedy.
“I think the most violent aspect of All My Sons is the way no one accepts to see others as they really are,” agrees Dubois. “Everybody in the family is blind to each other. And when nobody accepts the way people truly are, for sure everything will explode. And that’s what finally happens.”