Toronto, Montreal bridging theatrical divide
Canada’s two largest cities, only an hour apart by plane. Each has its own thriving theatre scene.
And yet Toronto and Montreal theatre barely even talk to each other.
A lot of this has to do with language, of course. While there’s a small English-language theatre community in Montreal, most of the activity there happens in French. In addition, approaches to esthetics, training and repertoire differ widely between the Québécois and Anglophone traditions.
All this might seem like obstacles to working together — but for some artists and producers, it’s exactly the reason to collaborate. Toronto “can only benefit from having exposure to work from Quebec,” argues Matthew Jocelyn, artistic director of Canadian Stage, which is currently producing, with Théâtre Français de Toronto, a groundbreaking staging of a play by Montreal writer Guillaume Corbeil.
Through March 5 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, a company of five actors is performing Five Faces for Evelyn Frost — Corbeil’s play in an English translation by Steven McCarthy; from March 21-25 in the same venue, the same actors will perform the play in French as Cinq visages pour Évelyne Frost.
On a smaller scale but with no less ambition, the independent company It Could Still Happen begins local performances on Wednesday of another project with roots on both sides of the Ottawa River. In HROSES: Outrage à la raison, written and directed by Jill Connell, one performer speaks English and the other French. The production, whose surtitle translates as “An affront to reason,” played a brief run in Montreal earlier this month before opening at the Waterworks in Toronto.
Five Faces/Cinq visages has its roots in an exploratory visit that Claude Poissant — then-artistic director of Montreal’s Théâtre PàP — made to Toronto several years ago, meeting big players on our theatre scene (including Jocelyn) and scouting around for possible projects: “We wanted to know why there is no connection.”
In 2013, Poissant staged the world premiere in Montreal of what was then titled Cinq visages pour Camille Brunelle, which both Jocelyn and translator McCarthy saw and admired. A dark and polarizing account of how young people construct identities online, Jocelyn calls it “one of the most pertinent pieces of theatre I can possibly imagine.”
Théâtre Français’ then-artistic director Guy Mignault and Canadian Stage cooked up the idea of a co-production directed by Poissant and alternately performed in both languages. Poissant says that he was initially “doubtful” that he could find bilingual actors up to this daunting task, but was impressed with the audition pool that presented itself and very happy with the five performers (one Montrealbased, four who live in Toronto) he eventually chose.
After the English run, the cast will rehearse for two weeks in French with Théâtre Français’ new artistic director Joël Beddows, and as performer Tara Nicodemo explains, this is more than just saying new words, and more than “using your mouth in a completely different muscular, mechanical way.”
“The character I play in French is going to be different than in English because it’s going to be informed by the cultural differences that live in me.”
For fellow performer Nico Racicot, the big challenge in working this way is “being able to access vulnerability in another language.”
To this native French speaker, performing in English is like “constant research. I have to ask how this word is affecting me, because it’s not really my word.”
Whereas language shifts in Five Faces/Cinq visages between perfor- mances, in HROSES linguistic difference is embedded in the show — though this was not always the case. An English-language version of the play has been produced twice, in Edmonton and Ottawa; it tells the story, Connell says, of “two characters who are deeply trying to understand each other.”
By adding in that one character — Ellery, played by Montrealer Frédéric Lemay — speaks French while Lily (Toronto-based Sascha Cole) speaks English, Connell says the hope is to “get closer to the questions the play is asking, and the visceral experience it offers . . . if you as an audience member only speak English or French, you are kind of in the same position as the characters.”
In one of the many unexpected connections between these two productions that point to the intimacy of the French-Canadian arts scene, Poissant, now artistic director of Montreal’s Théâtre Denise-Pelletier, will present HROSES in his 2017-18 season, in a slot devoted to shows from outside Quebec.
Such experiments in theatrical biculturalism seem likely to become more common in Toronto, where the French-speaking population is growing steadily thanks to increased immigration from the Francophonie.
Having moved to Toronto last year from Ottawa where he was witness to numerous unsuccessful artistic projects in which bilingualism was “institutionalized and enforced,” Beddows looks forward to fostering work in which moving between languages “is intrinsic to the form” — as is the case with HROSES — “or allows for the art to have greater dissemination” — as with Five Faces/Cinq visages. “That makes sense to me.” For tickets to Five Faces for Evelyn Frost/ Cinq visages pour Évelyne Frost: Canadianstage.com or 416-368-3110. HROSES plays Feb. 22 through March 4 at Waterworks, 505 Richmond St. W. itcouldstillhappen.com. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinee column with Carly Maga.