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Review: Robert Lepage and Michel Tremblay explore their memory palaces

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There’s a nice irony at the heart of Robert Lepage’s compelling — and surprisingly funny — new piece, 887. It has this most accomplished and technologically evolved of theatre artists fretting over the most basic requirement of putting on a show: remembering your lines.

In 2010, Lepage was invited to take part in an event to mark the 40th anniversary of La Nuit de la poésie, a pugnaciously poetic response to Quebec’s crisis year of 1970. His slot consisted of a midnight recital of Michèle Lalonde’s Speak White, and his panicky inability to learn its three pages of automatist verse (no rhyme, so much trickier) set him musing on memory and its diminishing returns once you’ve passed 50.

In typical Lepage fashion, this germ of an idea has grown into an intricate and often spectacular series of interconnections, paralleling his own childhood with Quebec’s post-Quiet Revolution growing pains, while exploring how the brain processes, and sometimes misplaces, information.

Appropriately for such personal material, 887 is a solo show (though Lepage has a sizable tech and co-writing team, which he brought out to join him for a hero’s welcome of a standing ovation on opening night at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde). The title of the show comes from the number of the apartment building Lepage grew up in, a scale model of which dominates the stage. But it’s much more than a toy doll’s house: technical wizardry peoples the rooms with tiny tenants and Lepage uses a phone camera to roam its interior. Mounted on a revolve, it also transforms into a series of startling stage pictures and beautifully realized locations, including a lonely neon-lit diner and a playful reconstruction of General de Gaulle’s “vive le Québec libre” visit.

As with his recent portrayal of the Marquis de Sade in Quills at Usine C, Lepage shows what a charismatic, at ease, and above all funny performer he is. He begins the show on a bare stage, affably addressing the audience like a particularly erudite standup. Several extended comedy routines — one involving an unco-operative answering machine, another a disastrous reunion with an old drama school buddy — serve as reminders of his early improv years.

Just as the set endlessly reconstructs itself, so the piece itself deftly switches moods. The laughs give way to melancholy when Lepage depicts his taxi-driving father’s lonely life, and to rage when he recalls a humiliating childhood incident under the War Measures Act. This last is the key to finally delivering a blazing recital of that pesky, memory-eluding poem. It is an unforgettable climax to a truly memorable show.

AT A GLANCE

887 continues to June 8 at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, 84 Ste-Catherine St. W. All performances are sold out. For more information, call 514-866-8668 or visit tnm.qc.ca.

***

Guylaine Tremblay and Henri Chassé are irresistible in Michel Tremblay's Encore une fois, si vous permettez, perfectly timed for Mother's Day weekend.

Guylaine Tremblay and Henri Chassé are irresistible in Michel Tremblay’s Encore une fois, si vous permettez, perfectly timed for Mother’s Day weekend.

In one of those rare heavenly alignments, the two major stars of Québécois theatre creation are currently facing each other on opposite sides of the street.

While Lepage pays tribute to his father at TNM, Michel Tremblay’s Encore une fois, si vous permettez paints a funny, loving portrait of his mother at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe.

As Nana (the part created for the late Rita Lafontaine in 1998), Guylaine Tremblay is a force of nature from the off, angrily clip-clopping down a long, surreal strip of chequered linoleum like a Plateau Mont-Royal version of Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. She launches into a blistering tirade, aiming to shame her son for some silly boyish prank, but repeatedly trips over herself with a series of increasingly absurd non sequiturs.

Then the two of them get into a delightful discussion over the merits, and otherwise, of Nana’s favourite reading, before she gets her claws out for a wonderfully catty analysis of her extended family. Finally, there’s the famous, incredibly moving sequence in which (as with Lepage) stage magic transforms memories and, in this case, aims to make the most painful of them easier to bear.

As the title suggests, Tremblay is indulging himself with this reprise portrait of his mother. But the writing is so entertaining, and the performances — both from his namesake and from Henri Chassé (playing six years old, late teens and adult narrator) — are so irresistible, few could possibly complain, even if it weren’t Mother’s Day weekend. 

AT A GLANCE

Encore une fois, si vous permettez continues to May 14 at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $58, $53 for age 65 and up, $35.50 for age 18 to 30, $25 for age 12 to 17. Call 514-288-5034 or visit duceppe.com.


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