New translation interesting, but flawed
Yours Forever, Marie-Lou
(out of 4) Written by Michel Tremblay. Translated by Linda Gaboriau. Directed by Diana Leblanc. Until Oct. 17 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-8668666
The beauty of live performance is in its temporality; it’s here one second and gone the next. Reach back into the vaults of film history and you have decades of styles and influences at your fingertips. Photographs and recordings of theatre don’t have the same effect.
This is what makes Soulpepper’s production of Michel Tremblay’s seminal 1970 play Yours Forever, Marie-Lou (originally À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou) rather interesting if not completely compelling. It’s the company’s first production of the famous Quebec playwright.
There’s something about director Diana Leblanc’s 2015 production, in a new translation by Linda Gaboriau, that feels very much of another time. There’s a pleasing familiarity to the production and universality to the story, but it feels removed from the here and now.
Tremblay’s family drama is built in small reveals leading to the biggest at the end: a structure that’s by now a riff on the typical Well-Made Play, though Tremblay’s story straddles a decade. Sisters Manon (Geneviève Dufour) and Carmen (Suzanne Roberts Smith) meet after years apart; Manon is devout, reclusive and judgmental; Carmen is a free-spirited country singer at a nightclub.
Their mean-spirited clash stems from their diverging paths in the wake of the trauma of their parents’ deaths 10 years earlier. Cutting into their scene together is the final argument between their father Léopold (Christian Laurin) and mother Marie-Lou (Patricia Marceau).
Despite it coming directly out of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, some of the ideas in Léo and Marie-Lou’s vitriol still seem relevant, specifically their contempt for their low-income, inescapable marriage and MarieLou’s hatred of loveless sex (her advice for getting through it, “don’t move and close your eyes,” uncom- fortably got a laugh at this performance).
The relationship between Manon and Carmen, on the other hand, feels irreconcilably dated.
At one point, Manon reveals that she witnessed her mother’s rape by their father as a child and calls them both “disgusting.”
Such a statement doesn’t necessarily take away from its effectiveness but does instill a certain distance from a modern audience.
Also distancing is the choppy cutting in and out of the two scenes on Glen Charles Landry’s set of dismembered car parts, with Manon and Carmen downstage and MarieLou and Léo above them on either side of the stage. As one scene interjects, one pair must remain awkwardly silent while the other pair finishes. This works between MarieLou and Léo, who do not share the
Yours Forever, Marie-Lou. same space nor even look at each other, so the audience never needs to believe their argument is unfolding in real time. The unwieldy pauses are not always so forgivable between Manon and Carmen, whose scene ends up with some slightly melodramatic performances as a result.
Those aren’t helped by a few predictable set, lighting and sound cues aligned with the family’s damning revelations.
Ultimately, these are small gripes about a script that has earned its place in the Canadian theatre canon. These characters are flawed, and they are alike in all the wrong ways and Leblanc knows how to make that explicitly clear.
But to produce a new translation of Yours Forever, Marie-Lou that seems to bring no connection to 2015 raises the question as to why it’s necessary in the first place.