I can’t listen to Nicole Perrier’s voice in Claude Léveillée’s “Un retardation” without a nostalgic feeling in my stomach. This music, which marked the beginning of the show “Le monde de Marcel Dubé”, reminds me again of the stories of the man who dominated our dramaturgy for more than 20 years.
Published at 1:23 am. Updated at 7:15 a.m.
Florence, Virginie, Médée, Manuel, Bilan, Le temps des lilacs, Les belles Dimanches, La cell… So many plays and teletheaters that testify to the invaluable contribution of the man who finally has the right to a worthy biography penned by Serge Bergeron.
In this reference work, the author paints a fair, thorough, and rigorous portrait of Dubé while drawing our attention to the important role he played in bringing our culture into the modern age.
Marcel Dubé was born in 1930 and grew up in a modest house on Logan Street in Montreal, which did not stop him from studying at the legendary Sainte-Marie College on Rue De Bleury, where Émile Nelligan, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau and Charles Gill and many others.
The young student shows a certain talent for writing. These will be the first tests, the first shocks. On May 22, 1948, the play Tit-Coq by Gratien Gélinas was performed at the Gesù, where the young Marcel worked as an usher. He saw the work several times.
His path is set: he will become a man of the theater!
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Guy Godin, Robert Rivard and Monique Miller in a scene from Zone by Marcel Dubé, February 21, 1953
In 1952, when Radio-Canada television was still in its infancy, Marcel Dubé imagined the piece that would catapult it into orbit. It is “Zone”, a work in which young gangsters can be seen smuggling cigarettes. The author wrote the play in three days, writing the lines in ballpoint pen, a practice he continued throughout his life.
Zone was founded on January 23, 1953 and consists of Robert Rivard, Raymond Lévesque, Guy Godin, Monique Miller, Hubert Loiselle, Jean-Louis Paris, Yves Létourneau and Jean Duceppe. Several of these actors remained loyal to Marcel Dubé. Together with Andrée Lachapelle, Marjolaine Hébert, Louise Marleau and others, they form “his” family.
From then on, Marcel Dubé established himself as the best-known theater and television writer in Quebec. The requests keep coming. He responds enthusiastically every time, even if he tends to submit his texts late and leave changes to the last minute.
Marcel Dubé earns a lot of money, but also spends a lot. Cicada and generous party animal, he lived beyond his means his whole life.
Marcel Dubé rose to prominence with “A Simple Soldier,” a work that premiered on Radio-Canada television in December 1957. This play revolves around Joseph Latour, played by Gilles Pelletier, who returns home after three years of training in the army. Hurt by his father’s remarriage to a woman he does not love, Joseph tears his soul apart in a monumental scene set before the closed door of the bedroom where his father and fat Bertha sleep.
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Gilles Pelletier and Paul Guèvremont in a scene from Marcel Dubé’s 1958 play “A Simple Soldier”.
The television version of A Simple Soldier is the subject of a chapter in Douze coups de théâtre by Michel Tremblay. For Marcel Dubé, this will be one of the most beautiful homages of his career.
Then there are a series of television novels such as “La Côte de Sable” with Louise Marleau and Clémence DesRochers, as well as numerous plays. Marcel Dubé, an ardent separatist, developed political ideas in Bilan and Les beaux Dimanches that would certainly cause him some difficulties.
For the play “On the Return of the White Geese,” which he wrote in 1966 for Louise Marleau (with whom he was madly in love), he set himself the goal of composing a tragedy like that of the time of Greek theater. He doesn’t miss his shot!
The 1968–1969 season, in which Montreal audiences were able to see three plays by Dubé, marked the birth of Les Belles-Sœurs by Michel Tremblay. Critics like to contrast Dubé with Tremblay, with the former using polished language while the latter takes full advantage of the joual. This invented contrast annoys Dubé, who, after a “playful” version of “A Simple Soldier,” adopts normative French for his subsequent pieces.
If Tremblay’s theater focuses on the lower middle class, Dubé’s does the same with a bourgeoisie drugged up and drowned in Scotch. In both cases the feathers are scalpels.
By the mid-1970s, some observers, including Jean-Claude Germain, gave Marcel Dubé the feeling that he had completed “taking stock of his dramatic world” and that his time was over. The author, who is in his forties, is suffering greatly.
Marcel Dubé underwent several hospital stays and surgical procedures to resolve problems related to an intestinal disease that he would carry with him throughout his life. His severe alcohol addiction doesn’t help matters. In the 1980s he experienced a horrific slump.
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Marcel Dubé in 1990
But after a long purgatory, directors came up with the idea of reviving his plays in the 1990s. René Richard Cyr took on “A Simple Soldier,” while Lorraine Pintal and André Brassard did the same with “Les Beaux Dimanches” and “Lila Zeit.”
In order to earn a living, Marcel Dubé accepts small proofreading jobs from a publisher. The one who has made Quebec spectators and spectators dream for many years with his plays is limited to rewriting other people’s texts.
At the beginning of 2016, people turned to themselves. He even refuses to answer calls from his friends. Marcel Dubé died on April 7th at the age of 86. Two weeks later, several personalities paid tribute to him.
His three muses are present: Andrée Lachapelle, Monique Miller and Louise Marleau. The latter reads an excerpt from her collection Poèmes de sable. “You were just an omen that would continue through billions of images and unfathomable dreams. »
Claude Léveillée’s piano can be heard. Heartbroken, those present remember Ciboulette’s words to her beautiful Tarzan in the final scene of Zone.
“Sleep, my handsome leader, street runner, roof jumper, sleep, I’m watching over you. »
Marcel Dubé – Writing to be spoken to
Lemeac
424 pages