DOUBLE DOSE OF MACBETH, IN FRENCH WITH A TWIST
Get a taste of Shakespeare in classic Québécois or Haitian Creole
“Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth,” groans one of the phantoms conjured up by the witches in Shakespeare’s Scottish play. To which Macbeth replies: “Had I three ears I’d hear thee.”
Macbeth himself would get by with the standard number of ears this week as just two productions of the play bearing his name are playing in Montreal, both of them revivals, both in French.
In the version translated by poet Michel Garneau, which opens at Usine C this week, the punchline to that admittedly awful joke is re-tooled as “J’écoute, j’écoute, j’fa’s rien qu’écouter.” It’s neither standard French nor Québécois joual but rather, as director Angela Konrad, points out “the language the French spoke when they came to Quebec in the 17th century. In many ways, it’s the same distance between the language of Shakespeare and modern English for the British.”
Garneau’s celebrated 1978 translation has come into its own again over the last year, thanks to Konrad’s ecstatically received production created during her residency at Usine C. It completely sold out its run in 2015 and looks set to do the same this time around (you’ll be hard-pressed to find a seat at this point, but extra dates have been added).
“I swim in Shakespeare,” is how the German-born, now Quebecbased Konrad almost swooningly describes her enthusiasm for the Bard when she joins the Montreal Gazette for coffee, just across from the UQAM building where she teaches theatre. This January, her company La Fabrik will be reprising her variation on Richard III, called Auditions ou Me, Myself and I at Théâtre de Quat’Sous.
In 2013, soon after arriving in Quebec, she road-tested her particular form of theatre, which she’s described as “a theatre of subtraction,” with a punkish riff on Macbeth called What Bloody Man is That?
She also tackled Chekhov at Festival TransAmériques last year with a radical pruning of The Cherry Orchard, complete with Amy Winehouse tunes.
Ever on the lookout for ways of blasting the classics out of their musty museums, Konrad says her heart beat faster when she came across the translation by Garneau. Garneau, whose imprisonment during the 1970 October Crisis served as his political awakening (and who later collaborated with Leonard Cohen on translations of the great man’s songs and poems), intended his Macbeth translation as a political espousal of Quebec culture.
“He takes a lot of liberties in the translation to directly address the Quebec people,” says Konrad. “For instance, he doesn’t say Scotland or l’Écosse but ‘mon pays.’ But his translation is always really close to the nervous system, the beat and the soul of Shakespeare.”
“I was astonished to hear young people had never heard about Garneau in school,” she continues. “But when they came to hear Macbeth, they had deep emotions because it reminded them of the language of their grandparents. They told me this is something that belongs to our culture, and it is vanishing.”
Part of the appeal of Konrad’s production, apart from the arcane muscularity of Garneau’s text, is its visual and deliberately circumscribed inventiveness. The cast has been reduced to just five performers in an intimate space.
Konrad’s regular collaborators — Phillipe Cousineau and Dominique Quesnel — play the murderous Macbeths, while, in the kind of meta-theatrical twist beloved of Konrad, the rest of the cast play the three witches playing all the other parts as well as directing events.
“The witches are like the directors of the cabaret,” Konrad notes.
Konrad has also added a character, played by one of the witches, to solve what she saw as a problem.
“For me, two things never work in theatre,” she says. “Death and
sexuality. You always see that Macbeth comes home from the battle and leaps on his wife, and it never works. And if something doesn’t work, that interests me. So you’ll see there’s an invention by me in that the Macbeths now have a dog. Lady Macbeth is childless, and the dog is like her baby. And the name of the dog is … what do you think? Rex. And what happens to Rex?”
Rex, of course, translates as King. Dog lovers and spoileravoiders might not want to dwell too much on that one.
The Other Theatre returned this week with its seventy-fiveminute, francophone version of Macbeth. Like Konrad’s version, it sold out during its previous run. Another similarity is that it brings something radically new to the table, linguistically speaking — in this case, Haitian Creole (these passages are translated by French surtitles).
Loosely inspired by Orson Welles’s 1936 “voodoo Macbeth,” director Stacey Christodoulou sets the action in a war-torn Haiti, with militias, machetes and ghostly ritual all playing out in an eerily primal set of looming boughs and shimmering silks.
Infinithéâtre’s intrepid search for new anglo Quebec plays continues next weekend with the latest edition of The Pipeline, the annual public readings of winning entries in their Write-on- Q competition.
Previous plays that have passed through The Pipeline include Marianne Ackerman’s Triplex Nervosa and Arthur Holden’s The Book of Bob, both of which went on to full productions at the Centaur, and Alyson Grant’s hospital comedy Progress!, which got a full site-specific production at the forsaken Royal Vic.
Grant is back again to kick off this year’s Pipeline with Conversions, which plays Fri., Dec. 2, at 3 p.m. A dark comedy about ugly goings-on around the family dinner table, it’s directed by Infinithéâtre’s Guy Sprung.
Next up, on Sat., Dec. 3, at 7 p.m., is Michael Milech’s The Nutritional Value of Anger, about an angry young homeless woman outside a store, an Iranian immigrant who owns said store, and a young man shopping for soup. It’s directed by Howard Rosenstein, who also happens to be reprising his role as a horny Orthodox rabbi in Milech’s superb Fringe award-winning Honesty Rents by the Hour when it returns next year.
Then on Sun., Dec. 4, at 2 p.m., it’s the turn of Alexandria Haber’s play, Alice and the World We Live In, which explores the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. Erstwhile Geordie boss Dean Fleming directs.