A Trudeau origin story
Maggie & Pierre (out of 4) By Linda Griffiths with Paul Thompson, directed by Rob Kempson. Until May 19 at Tarragon Theatre Workspace, 30 Bridgman Ave. Tarragontheatre.com and 416-531-1827
“He was a member of the ruling class that chose to rule … and because he was sexy and classy and athletic … we became sexy and classy and athletic.”
Change “athletic” to “wore fun socks” and you’d think we were talking about our current prime minister, who’s making Canada cool all over again.
But the words are from the late Linda Griffiths’ 1980 solo show about Justin’s father, the first prime minister Trudeau, and his relationship with his much younger “flower child” wife. The play Maggie & Pierre, which Griffiths created with director Paul Thompson, was a sensation when it premiered and made Griffiths famous. She toured around Canada and to New York City with the production, which became front-page news in its own right.
It takes guts — and a laudable respect for Canadian theatre history — to stage a play so associated with a singular and beloved talent (Griffiths died in 2014). The indie company timeshare is doing a strong job with the material on an evidently modest budget. I didn’t see the original so don’t have a point of comparison but can say that Kaitlyn Riordan stands up impressively to this major acting challenge.
There is a framing device that hasn’t aged particularly well: the play opens with a journalist named Henry (also played by Riordan) being persuaded to write about the Trudeaus again, having covered them closely in their heyday. Henry feels like an unnecessary structural crutch.
The pace flows quickly under Kempson’s fluid direction, and Riordan moves with grace and precision between three distinct vocal and physical characterizations, capturing Pierre Trudeau’s patrician tones and Margaret’s spacey-stagey way of talking.
Griffiths and Thompson were writing about events that were happening almost in real time, chronicling the decline in the Trudeaus’ relationship and Margaret’s adventures with the Rolling Stones and on the dance floor of Studio 54. The hindsight knowledge now of Margaret’s bipolar disorder allows us to see how perceptive they were in portraying her fraying sense of self as not just flakiness but as someone sinking under intense pressure of the public gaze and declining mental health.
For younger and new Canadians there is insight here too into the personalities and environment that shaped Justin Trudeau. On the beach in Tahiti where Maggie and Pierre first meet, they bond through their shared desire “to be world-renowned, to shape destiny, to be deliriously happy,” and the play chronicles their pursuit of these goals in ways that at first overlap and increasingly diverge.
It’s still kind of hard to believe that Griffiths and Thompson had the guts to riff on the personal life of a sitting head of government. What would the equivalent Justin Trudeau play look like? Perhaps some young theatre artist who comes to see this timely revival will be provoked to provide the answer.