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Viola Leger has owned the part of the scrubwoman La Sagouine for 40 years.Nir Bareket

La Sagouine

  • Written by Antonine Maillet
  • Directed by John Van Burek
  • Starring Viola Léger
  • At the Pleiades Theatre in Toronto

Her face is as shapeless and crumpled as an old washrag. Her voice has the creaks and squeaks of an oil-parched cupboard door. But even at a distance, her tiny eyes gleam with wit like a pair of well-polished teaspoons.

Viola Léger doesn't just act the part of the shrewd Acadian scrubwoman La Sagouine; she embodies her completely. The character is in her bones. As well it should be - Léger originated and has owned the role for four decades.

She first performed it in 1971, when writer Antonine Maillet expanded a series of radio monologues into the one-woman play La Sagouine. From there, the show toured and triumphed internationally and has become the stuff of Canadian theatre legend, even if many of us have never seen it. Léger - better known of late for her 2002-2006 stint as a senator - last took it across English Canada in 1980.

So the new production by Toronto's Pleiades Theatre, starring the now-80-year-old actor, is a must-see - for historical reasons, but also, and more importantly, to savour Maillet's rich, earthy writing and Léger's impeccable performance.

La Sagouine is the elderly wife of a fisherman and looks back on her life from the vantage point of her Acadian village (based on Maillet's own hometown of Bouctouche, N.B.).

The Pleiades production, gently directed by John Van Burek, consists of five monologues in which she ponders birth, death, war, religion and the perplexing Acadian identity with the wry skepticism of the poor and marginalized.

Hers has been a hard life, in which she has known hunger, seen shipwrecks and buried too many infants. It's enough to make her wonder if the hell her Catholic Church speaks of can be any worse than what she and her people have already experienced. She isn't complaining, though. Unlike her "bilious" husband Gapi, who is as much a social critic as an oyster-and-smelt fisherman, La Sagouine is calmly philosophical. That is, when she isn't bemused by government census-takers, or amused by the chaos that ensues when the parish priest decides to put the church's seating up for auction.

The latter comic episode (The Pews) is Maillet at her most folksy - think of an Acadian Stuart McLean. She also relies on her unlettered character's malapropisms for some easy laughs. More often, though, the play's salt-of-the-earth observations have real weight, and in La Sagouine's croaking voice you hear echoes of a classic lineage. When she confesses that it isn't death that troubles her, "it's what comes after," she sounds like a humble Hamlet. And there's a hint of Brecht's Mother Courage when, with cheerful irony, she explains the pecuniary advantages of a war.

Even her look belongs to the ages. François Barbeau has clothed her in the earth tones of one of Jean-François Millet's Barbizon peasants. And when, in her yellow kerchief, she scours the black-and-white-tiled floor of Yannik Larivée's simple set, she recalls a maid in a painting by Vermeer.

La Sagouine is considered a landmark in bringing Canada's disenfranchised Acadian community to the stage. However, any suspicion that its achievement is more cultural than artistic is dispelled in the final monologue, a meditation on the seasons and the land in which Maillet is at her most poetic and moving (and the original Luis de Céspedes translation of her Acadian French rises to the occasion).

It is a thing of rugged, aching beauty, and Léger speaks it in a tone of almost breathless rapture. At last, we understand why she and this play are national treasures.

La Sagouine runs in English at the Pleiades Theatre until May 29; in French, May 31-June 5.

Special to The Globe and Mail

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