‘Classics should survive in translation but it’s unusual to hear that they’re improved by it’
Michel Tremblay’s Yours Forever, Marie-Lou gets an updated name and translation in new Soulpepper production
There’s something in the program notes for the Soulpepper production of Michel Tremblay’s Yours Forever, Marie-Lou that perplexes me. Actually there are two things. One is that the first two words of the title are given as Forever Yours, which was the order adopted in the play’s first English translation but not in the one that the production is actually using.
That’s odd but probably not important. I doubt that either variant is more faithful than the other to Tremblay’s original French. Or rather to Tremblay’s original joual, since the play was written, in 1970, in that demotic Quebecois variant of French. I’m ignorant of joual (even more than I am of French) but that’s all right since, according to the same program note, “in their native French, Tremblay’s plays can feel dated because the language remains fixed in the idioms of the 1960s.” Now that’s weird. Tremblay’s plays are generally touted as “Canadian classics,” and I have to feel skeptical of the classic status of plays whose original texts are dated and have to be “revitalized” by their translators, in this case the ubiquitous Linda Gaboriau. Of course, classics should survive in translation but it’s unusual to hear that they’re improved by it.
Anyway in another program note, Diana Leblanc, who directs the Soulpepper revival, comes down firmly on the side of tradition. She writes of the original’s “spare elegance” and describes it as “breathtaking.” She agrees, though, in heaping praise on Gaboriau’s translation. Just as well, as there seems these days to be a law against anyone else translating French-Canadian plays. The current text does include one superbly chilling line: An expectant mother declares that she will love her new child “to death.” The words come late in the play, by which time we have been told enough for them to carry a horrific charge.
Marie Lou is a split-level play, literally so in Leblanc’s production, which gives us two characters upstairs and two down. Up aloft we have Leopold, a garage mechanic, and his wife Marie Louise; the two despise one another. This will be their last day on Earth. We know this from the reminiscences, 10 years later but staged simultaneously, of their grown daughters, who occupy the space below: Manon, a religious devotee still living in her parents’ house, and Carmen, a self-described free spirit who has left the family scene to become a country singer on the notorious Montreal strip known as the Main.
Glen Charles Landry’s set is somewhat realistic, though dotted with symbols. There’s a crucifix, for the Catholicism that oversees both the believers and the skeptics in the cast, and the outline of a car, suggesting both the family vehicle (ill-omened in itself ) and the job that Leopold loathes. Marie Louise, sitting with her knitting, feels just as oppressed by her role as wife and mother. There’s a third child — a boy, whom we don’t see — and she dreads the prospect of a fourth, though she does change her mind about this. Even that, though, seems to be a way of taunting her husband. They both feel, justly, that they’re in a state of economic servitude. They start the proceedings by arguing over brands of peanut butter and go steadily downhill from there. The play, an hour and a quarter without an interval, is their short day’s journey into night.
It feels long, however; longer than Eugene O’Neill’s family marathon did in either Leblanc’s great Stratford production or her good Soulpepper one. Tremblay’s play has traditionally been staged (or so I gather; I’ve never seen it before) as a dramatic tone poem, with the four characters seated and stationary, in a Beckettian limbo. In Leblanc’s quasi-naturalistic staging, the parents stay static but the daughters get to move around, just as their dialogue switches between verbal reminiscence and physical flashback. There’s a gain in surface variety but probably a loss in intensity.
In fact, the elders, exchanging recriminations from opposite sides of the stage, have the best of it. Their grudges and grievances seem wearisomely familiar at first, but when they get around to discussing their sex life, or the lack of it, the play becomes powerful and shocking, not in the sense of breaching taboos but of telling dramatic truths. There’s poignance, too, in the one glimpse of former tenderness, as captured in the title, whichever way round you want to phrase it. The performances of Christian Laurin and Patricia Marceau are uneven, but at their best they do seem like stubborn, suffering people.
At other times, they seem like actors. This, though, puts them ahead of their younger colleagues, who never seem like anything else. Geneviève Dufour’s repressed Manon is a monotone wraith, Suzanne Roberts Smith’s Carmen an automaton who never utters a believably conversational word. She is, to judge from her name and bio, the only Anglo in the cast, but she is less expressive with this English text than any of her francophone colleagues.
“You love to wallow in your misery” says Carmen to her sister, and it seems all too true of every character in the play, herself included, for all her boasts of independence. Is she the same character as the martyred country singer of Tremblay’s later play, Saint Carmen of the Main? If so, she certainly changed. But maybe the author was just having a little joke. Yours Forever, Mary-Lou is in repertory
through Oct. 17 at the Young Centre