After excelling on radio, television and in the movies, Roger Lemelin’s famous family finally enters the theater.
The climb proved to be as steep as it had been in the 1930s for modest families from the lower town who, like Ovide Plouffe (and Roger Lemelin himself), dreamed of reaching the upper town. The Trident, the spearhead of theater in Quebec, took up the challenge of transporting to the stage this family that ensured the heyday of Quebec television from 1953 to 1959. A delicate operation that involved the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier, whose main mission is to introduce young people to theatrical culture.
The play, shown until next Saturday at the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier (it will certainly be extended or repeated since its success is so great), must have amazed all Quebecers of the “y” and “z” generations who saw it. She reeks of a good God that no longer exists in Quebec, and she exudes such naivety that she comes across as a caricature. Even Théophile’s (Roger Léger) muted anger against the English seems outrageous. Thanks to television, older viewers were able to quickly reconnect with family members they knew by heart.
NOSTALGIA THAT YOU HAVE US!
I would be surprised if his lovers did not feel, as I do, a great nostalgia for Amanda Alarie, Paul Guèvremont, Jean-Louis Roux, Émile Genest, Denise Pelletier, Pierre Valcour and Rolland Bédard, who portrayed the main characters with so much truth. Fortunately, the author of the adaptation did not try to revive Father Gédéon, whom Doris Lussier had immortalized and who had then become almost unbearable through his excesses. The less old people who loved Gilles Carles Plouffe would have found it difficult not to see Anne Létourneau as Rita Toulouse, Denise Filiatrault as Cécile or Juliette Huot as Joséphine.
Despite my good intentions, I had difficulty getting rid of the characters from the TV series that were firmly etched in my memory. It was unfair to the remarkable cast that The Trident brought together on stage. This is even more true for Maryse Lapierre, who has found a way to make her fifteen actors move extremely fluidly in complex and very clever settings.
Quite a bet
Isabelle Hubert’s adaptation, based more on the novel and the film than on the series itself, abandons traditional theatricality in favor of a sequence of scenes that are mainly chronicles. Some scenes are hilarious, particularly the opera that Ovid performs for his family. The visit of King George VI and the Queen in Quebec on the eve of the Second World War is a true anthology piece.
It was quite a challenge to adapt my late comrade Roger Lemelin’s novel for the stage. Despite the respect I owe Roger, his novel is seriously out of date. It has the naivety of most novels from this emerging era of our literature. The challenge of bringing him to the theater was all the more risky because television and cinema had given Plouffe’s characters dimensions and depth that the novel had “common” to them.
We owe this added value to the excellent director of the television series Jean-Paul Fugère. It seems to have been lost on the director and director of the play. There’s no easier access to theater than in Upper Quebec!
