CENTAUR LAUNCHES ENGLISH VERSION OF SMASH THRILLER
Hitchcock influence shows in Toupin’s twisting and turning study of misogyny
Playwright Catherine-anne Toupin likes to make her audiences gasp with shock and awe. She has heard those gratifying gasps many times over the last two years while performing in her own twisting, turning thriller La Meute, which opens at the Centaur on Tuesday in an English version called Mob.
“Every single night, there were two moments especially when I heard people saying ‘oh my god!’ very loudly,” recalled Toupin. “Which I love.”
La Meute was first produced in 2018 at La Licorne, which is where Toupin joined the Montreal Gazette for a chat. Such was the enormous buzz the play created that it was reprised twice, both times selling out well in advance of opening night. Centaur artistic director Eda Holmes was at the première, immediately collared Toupin as she came offstage shaking with nervous energy, and offered there and then to put it on at the Centaur. The English version’s run has already been extended by a week due to popular demand.
No doubt part of the attraction of the play has been the dynamic plotting, which sees a woman named Sophie taking to the road after a work-related trauma. She winds up at a remote bed and breakfast run by a deceptively nice young man and his elderly relative.
Already you might have the screeching violins of a certain movie thriller playing in your head, and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Although Toupin says the similarities in those opening scenes to the plot of Psycho are entirely accidental, she fesses up to being steeped in the language, mood and hairpin twists of classic edge-of-the-seat films.
“I was introduced to them by my wonderful grandma,” she said. “She loved old movies and she was the official babysitter to me and my sister, and we only watched old movies together.
So that’s where I discovered the likes of Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. I was probably 12 when I saw Psycho for the first time — too young! But I really enjoyed it. So Hitchcock especially has, I think without my knowing it, had a huge influence on my writing. I’ve seen all his movies at least 20 times.”
Exactly where Mob goes after that intriguing opening is something we can’t discuss here if we’re to preserve its carefully calibrated surprises. Suffice to say the play’s themes revolve around misogyny in the workplace.
“I think what’s relevant is the violence between the characters,” said Toupin, with practised avoidance of spilling too many beans. “It’s really about how they get into that vicious circle and can’t get themselves out of it. I think we’re all becoming desensitized to a lack of empathy and understanding for somebody who’s different. That’s the main subject of the play.”
The misogyny angle has clearly struck a chord in the #Metoo era, and the exact nature of Sophie’s workplace (we have to keep that under wraps, too) is arguably central to the powerful effect of the play. But at the end of the day, said Toupin, “to me it has no importance which industry this play takes place in. It could take place in the film industry, it could take place in a restaurant.”
(For the record, the play has nothing to do with the Québécois far-right group that goes by the name La Meute. Toupin began writing it well before that ugly development in the province’s politics.)
As well as the promise of a gripping night out, La Meute had another ace up its sleeve when it played La Licorne: the onstage appearance of Toupin herself. She’s a household name among francophone Quebecers, thanks to her television appearances in the prison drama Unité 9, Les hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin and in the sitcom Boomerang, which she also created.
Born in 1975 in Ottawa, where her father worked in the federal government, Toupin soon moved to Quebec City after her father got a job in the provincial government. She came to Montreal in 1996 when she enrolled at the Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique, after which she started Théâtre ni plus ni moins with Frédéric Blanchette and François Létourneau, both now major figures on Montreal’s francophone theatre scene. That company’s first production was Toupin’s L’envie, which she also acted in, and which played at Théâtre d’aujourd’hui in 2004.
Toupin cites Harold Pinter as one of her favourite playwrights, and you can see his influence in her second play, À présent, which premièred at La Licorne in 2007. It’s a superb tragicomic domestic nightmare with distinct similarities to Pinter’s The Homecoming. Unaccountably, no anglo theatre in Montreal, or indeed in Canada, has picked it up — it had to travel to Bath in the U.K. to play in English, as Right Now.
All the francophone first runs of Toupin’s plays have seen her taking the lead female role.
“It’s important for me, when I’ve written something, to perform it for the first time,” she said. “I find that’s part of the arc of creation.”
She speaks flawless English, so I wondered aloud why she isn’t again putting herself into Sophie’s shoes for this Centaur production.
“Oh, I’ve already performed it 80 times,” she laughed, with a dismissive wave, before expressing confidence in the play’s new Sophie, Adrianne Richards, as well as with Richards’s co-stars, Matthew Kabwe and Susan Bain.
As with Right Now, this English version is by Chris Campbell, a British translator who was literary manager in London’s prestigious Royal Court Theatre. Toupin reckons director Andrew Shaver will keep the play grounded in a Canadian milieu.
Of seeing her work make the leap across the linguistic divide, Toupin said: “I actually find translation exciting. You lose something, but gain something else. I think the biggest challenge in the English translation has been to find the poetry of the violence. In (the original), there’s something poetic in that violence. It feels like a kind of a dream place that the characters enter, and I want the audience to enter into that too — to be appalled, but also strangely compelled.”
And, of course, to yell “oh my god!” in all the right places.