Anglo theatre companies working with francophone actors, designers, etc. is now an adventure so commonplace in Montreal as to be quite unremarkable. Nevertheless, Talisman Theatre has decided to make staging English translations of Québécois plays their specialty. If no longer novel, the mandate is nevertheless artistically interesting, as ably proven by their current production of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Down Dangerous Passes Road. Watching the clash of two very different theatre aesthetics – both the highs and the lows – makes for a fascinating 90 minutes.
As far as the audience knows, the action takes place on a roadside near a lake, where a truck bearing three brothers has just collided with a tree. The youngest, Carl (Patrick Costello), is due to be married later in the day, which is why Ambrose (Marcelo Arroyo) has come back to Alma from the big city after an absence of three years. At the insistence of the eldest, Victor, (Graham Cuthbertson) they’ve gone out for a drive in the country hours before the wedding. Carl and Ambrose are the first to emerge from the crash, and almost immediately get into an argument about cultural values, Ambrose being a militant gay with a lover dying of aids, Carl, an underemployed small-town guy.
From a dramatic point of view, the play is weak. There’s a great deal of shouting, leading to fisticuffs and much hugging, but very little of it is springs naturally or of necessity from an immediate conflict. Instead, Bouchard seems to have tossed in everything that came to mind about three somewhat stereotypical characters.
Director Emma Tibaldo is most at ease with the naturalist elements offered by the text. The actors are riveted to each other, devouring their lines and spitting them back out with tremendous energy. A five-person design team caters to the play’s poetic side, with a video montage of the dangerous bend in the road projected on undulating backdrops which serve as the set, suggesting we’re in Lost Highway territory. As the end nears, this hint of David Lynch grows, until finally, all the annoying implausible moments are cancelled out. The play works retroactively.
Only when Graham Cuthbertson emerges from the ditch with a six-pack of beer does the acting really start to cook. He’s at ease with the role of an earthy if tortured working man, and quickly tips the balance toward naturalism. Costello and Arroyo follow, and dark truths come gushing out.
It won’t be giving away the ending to report that Down Dangerous Passes Road is a cri de coeur for the sacred superiority of art, because at some level, that’s what most contemporary Quebecois plays are about. Talisman’s attack is bold and imaginative. Watching the dueling aesthetics, one has a feeling the effort of translation is in equal measure hopeless and essential, and therefore, quite a good reason for doing theatre.
Continues through Saturday at Theatre La Chapelle, 3700 St. Dominique St.
Box office: 514-843-7738.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I saw DOWN DANGEROUS PASSES ROAD the other night. After it was over, my date vomited on the sidewalk, repeatedly. I didn’t much like the play, either.
I felt the script, directing, an acting all shared the blame for an hour and a half of squirming in my front row seat. (I did like the set design, though.)
SCORCHED at the Centaur was another failed exercise in translation. It seems a small industry has grown up around translating scripts from one official language to the other. After frequent exposure to the theatrical results, I understand why the Jesuits were burned at the stake. No culture should have to undergo a brutal, forced conversion.
Quebecois is a peculiar example of a culture that has been driven into the woods of its own untranslatable poetry. What works in French — certain shared intonations, gestures, and emotions – doesn’t always stand up very well in the headlights of an English theatical expose. Theatre is an intimate art form that feeds on subtext, undercurrents and sous-entendus. Put a group of people on stage and expect them to divulge their peculiarities and secrets — that’s a recipe for embarrassment.
On an Anglo stage Quebecois characters and most particularly their emotions often end up sounding either banal or borderline psychotic . All the subtle humour and warmth evaporates in the awkwardness of translation. Even their movements seem jerky and unnatural.
Translated plays remind me of autopsies, and I’d rather not attend too many more of those in my lifetime.
I too saw DOWN DANGEROUS PASSES ROAD, and I concede Ann Diamond’s point that it’s a tricky text to stage. It’s lyrical, laced with repetition, overheated in places and contemplative in others – and in conventional dramatic terms, not much happens. But unlike Ann Diamond, I enjoyed the show. Linda Gaboriau’s translation was sensitive and intelligent. Emma Tibaldo directed – and her cast performed – with passionate honesty. Michel Marc Bouchard’s delicate play, with all its cultural and geographical attachments to French-speaking Quebec, was made to work in English.
On the more fundamental question of whether translation, which is necessarily an enterprise of approximation and distortion (and not just in theatre, and not just from Quebecois), is worth the effort at all, I think Ms. Diamond is too harsh. In fact, I would say part of the appeal of translated plays lies in what she calls awkwardness but I would call the contact of cultures: the neither-here-nor-there quality that comes from taking words in one language and restating them in another.
We Anglo Montrealers are uniquely lucky. Our bilingualism gives us a sensitivity to translation that New Yorkers and (less forgivably) Torontonians lack, but that our Franco fellow-Montrealers fully share. Anthony Shaeffer; Michel Marc Bouchard; Carole Fréchette: these playwrights’ works, among others, were performed in translation in Montreal this year. I would say audiences were enriched. So were the works themselves.
Translated plays aren’t autopsies. They’re transplants, grafts of one linguistic tissue onto another. They’re imperfect and maybe even incongruous. Yet when done by gifted artists, they’re a wonder to behold.
Unless, of course, the experience is marred by a date who vomits copiously on the way out of the theatre. But that, surely, is better blamed on dinner than the play.
Beautiful repost Mr. Holden. Articulate, balanced, thoughtful. I don’t recall ever reading such a neat summary of why Montreal is the cultural heartland (if not the capital) of Canada. Please continue to write.