WAR HAS CONSEQUENCES. The evening news gives us a play-by-play of what it looks like but images don’t affect us on a visceral level. Not so with great theatre. No one is left numb after watching Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched, which just opened Centaur Theatre’s 40th Season. From the opening scene to the last, the audience is hooked to the heart-wrenching story of a family, and by extension, a nation, ripped asunder by civil war.
Mouawad plays with time, beginning with a simple love story. A young couple living in a remote village in an unnamed Middle-Eastern country, Nawal and Wahab (Janick Hébert and Sergio Di Zio) learn they will become parents. But tradition intervenes. Moments after the child’s birth, Nawal’s mother snatches the baby from her daughter’s arms and sends him to an orphanage. Nawal’s grandmother warns that the only way to break the cycle of poverty and violence in their village is to learn to read, write and think. “Where there is no language, there is no love”. And so Nawal does. She returns to the village, inscribing the name of her grandmother on her grave, the first in her village to do so, and then embarks on a search for her son.
Flash-forward to Montreal, where Nawal’s adult children, Simon and Janine (Sergio De Zio again, and Sophie Goulet) attend a reading of their late mother’s will. From a kindly notary (Alon Nashman), who provides much of the play’s comic relief through his inventive malapropisms, they learn of peculiar instructions she has left behind – a letter for each of them, to be delivered to their father, who they thought was dead, and a brother they never knew existed.
Through clever staging (a stage floor of sand, multiple scenes playing out in parallel and actors playing multiple roles) the ensuing search draws them into a soulful journey uncovering family history. The truth they discover leaves them, and the audience, feeling as if someone had peeled away a layer of skin.
Mouawad reveals modern war, from torture to betrayal to children raised on a meal of continual conflict. For audiences used to the daily media feed of violence, the experience of this play creeps unexpectedly under the skin. Scorched is theatre that challenges the senses, seizes its audience with a compelling story and universal themes, never letting go. A deeply moving production by Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, great writing and staging, beautifully translated from the French by Montrealer Linda Gaboriau, Scorched is on a cross-country tour. Continues at Centaur Theatre until November 2.
Don’t miss it.
Read Part II: By Patrick Charron
