HOUSES OF THE DAMNED
Spirits haunt two very different theatrical productions
Appropriately, there’s a haunting of houses this week in two wildly contrasting evenings of theatre.
In Théâtre Jean-Duceppe’s Ils étaient tous mes fils (the French version of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons), the memory of a young airman missing in action hovers over the suburban idyll of a successful businessman and his family. As in the grand tradition of Greek and Ibsenite tragedy that Miller so skilfully draws on, a buried crime threatens to emerge from the manicured lawns.
Written just after the Second World War and just before Death of a Salesman, All My Sons is Miller’s morally forceful assault on the kind of corner-cutting capitalism that callously risked the lives of young men who fought overseas.
Its deeply flawed tragic hero is factory owner Joe Keller (magnificently played by theatrical
heavyweight Michel Dumont), who is sitting pretty after his partner is packed off to prison for shipping out fatally faulty plane engines. Cleared of any wrongdoing himself, the ever-popular Joe nevertheless keeps a wary eye on the neighbours from his throne-like garden chair, should any suspicion threaten to come his way.
Lending emotionally charged (and occasionally funny) support to Dumont’s powerhouse performance is a nine-strong cast including Benoît McGinnis as his idolizing son, Louise Turcot as his grief-stricken wife, Évelyne Rompré as the sweet-natured but tough-as-nails girl next door, and Vincent-Guillaume Otis as a weak-willed visitor who turns out to be Joe’s most dangerous nemesis.
Director Frédéric Dubois (whose distillation of Shakespeare’s history cycle, Five Kings, is playing at Espace Go) pushes beyond the play’s naturalism to hint at the underlying artifice, which — some overwrought turning of the narrative screws notwithstanding — makes it all the more potent.
In Olivier Landreville’s set, Keller’s house is a fragile skeleton through which we see characters waiting, as sedate as waxworks, for their entrance, while a blownup aerial photograph suggests a ghostly pilot’s-eye view of the neighbourhood. André Rioux’s lighting beautifully marks the hours of this one fatal day — imperceptibly at first — from the effulgence of afternoon to the gathering shadows of evening, to Joe’s agonizing dark night of the soul.
A house of pain of an entirely
different kind stands a couple of blocks down from the Duceppe, where the team at Théâtre Sainte-Catherine has converted the whole venue into a red-glowing hell on Earth, seething and wriggling with wretched, often naked sinners. Sin, in fact, is the name of this latest Halloween treat at the TSC. Last time, they turned the building into a horror hospital; they still have the surgical masks to prove it, which guests are ordered to strap on before entering, abandoning all hope, and embarking on their guided tour, helped on their way by some bad-tempered figures in black cowls.
It would be a sin to reveal too much of what goes on within those dank walls, amid the labyrinthine corridors and spiral staircases. Like the tackiest ghost train rides (or, perhaps more aptly, the ickiest, most ghoulish sex clubs), the fun lies in not knowing what’s around the next corner. An unholy mélange of David Fincher’s Seven, Dante’s Inferno and Pasolini’s infamous torture film Salò might give you some idea of what to expect.
If you still think that sounds like a fun Halloween activity for the whole family, be advised that Sin is strictly 18-plus.