Memorable tragi-comedy for Surette’s swan song
Jean Marchand, Jim Burke writes, gives a superb performance as an Alzheimer’s-stricken professor yearning for the promise of the Lévesque years in François Archambault’s tragi-comedy.
Professor of history and onetime media personality Edouard is lost in the woods in You Will Remember Me, as François Archambault’s Tu te souviendras de moi is called in Bobby Theodore’s translation.
Eo Sharp’s set and Luc Prairie’s lighting situate Edouard’s living room in the midst of sometimes spookily towering trees, suggesting an appropriately grim fairytale environment as Edouard regresses into second childhood. It’s also suggestive of that opening line in Dante’s Inferno about getting lost in a dark wood midway through life
The hell into which Edouard is ineluctably sliding is the disintegration of memory through Alzheimer’s, a particularly cruel ending for a man whose swaggering sense of self-worth revolves around scholarly recall.
Jean Marchand, fresh from playing God in Brecht’s La bonne âme du Se-Tchouan at TNM, beautifully suggests Edouard’s
intellectual narcissism from the outset. As he’s interviewed one last time for television (the crew, we later discover, are more interested in recording his symptoms than his words of wisdom), he punctuates his misanthropic musings about the decline of civilization with self-satisfied little sniffs and finicky hand movements.
But as pompous as his character initially seems, Marchand, with his serenely expressive features, gradually draws us into an unbearable sense of his desolation and suffering. One particular moment stands out: While listening to a nostalgic pop song on a scratchy 45, Marchand seems to physically efface himself so that only the great dark pools of his eyes remain, staring into a sweetly remembered past.
Which isn’t to say Archambault has written a maudlin or a depressing play. He even gets comic mileage out of the central predicament, with Edouard himself appreciating the Beckettian absurdities into which it sometimes leads him and which exasperate the family members trying to care for him.
But what really moves the play beyond medical melodrama is the connection Archambault makes between personal and national memory, with Edouard fixating on that melancholy moment in 1980 when René Lévesque put on a brave face as the results of the referendum came in. Will Quebec’s memory of itself one day disintegrate, Archambault asks through Edouard? And are we shortcircuiting our own synapses by living in a permanent, social media-driven present? Personally, I would have taken more of this kind of thing over some of the domestic scenes, which occasionally teeter into overly familiar family drama tics.
Edouard is fast becoming a major figure of modern Quebec drama, thanks to the considerable success of Archambault’s play, so much so that the other characters can easily be overshadowed.
Thankfully, director Roy Surette has gathered a cast that resists this. Johanna Nutter is vibrantly down-to-earth as Edouard’s grown-up daughter, Isabelle. Lally Cadeau simmers with both guilt and rebelliousness as his long-suffering wife, Madeleine. Charles Bender initially comes over as a bit of an insipid nice guy as Isabelle’s boyfriend, Patrick, but finds layers of complexity as self-interest propels him toward questionable behaviour. And so good is Amanda Silveira as Patrick’s teenage daughter, Bérénice — at first brattishly sparring with Edouard, then, in a startling dramatic development, finding a reason to bond with him — one wished the play’s structure weren’t so fragmented, so that the scenes between them could be given more room to breathe.
Quibbles aside, this is a fine production of a thrillingly multilayered play that will be remembered mostly for Marchand’s immensely moving performance, but also as a fitting swan song from Surette as he prepares to pass Centaur’s reins to a new artistic director.