SummerWorks Festival
(At various venues In Toronto until August 15)
Quebec playwright Olivier Choinière’s Bliss premiered in Montreal in 2007; now it is getting its English-Canadian premiere at Toronto’s SummerWorks festival. But the play’s path from point A to point B wasn’t a straightforward trip down the 401.
Indeed, somewhat surprisingly, it had its English-language premiere at London’s Royal Court Theatre two years ago in a translation by none other than the well-regarded British playwright Caryl Churchill. It's great to finally get a chance to look at this version on this side of the ocean.
Three actors dressed like Walmart employees stand on an elevated platform, excitingly telling the audience a story about Céline Dion they’ve gleaned from glossy magazines. A fourth Walmart employee named Caro (a seemingly possessed Delphine Bienvenu) stands apart with a microphone, interrupting from time to time to clarify or correct the tale – or send it in an unexpected direction.
Gradually, this star-struck tale about Céline’s pregnancy diverges further and further from reality until it morphs into a horrific story about one of her fans, Isabelle, who is kept locked in her room and abused by her father, mother and brother. The bright lights of Las Vegas flood into the dark of a Josef Fritzl-style dungeon and the effect is disorienting – it's like the ink from two pages of a trashy celebrity-and-crime tabloid have bled together in the rain.
In the third part of the play, Bliss takes us into the Walmart where these characters work – there we meet Caro, a lonely cashier despised by her coworkers whose only uplift in her life is Céline Dion’s music. She is the link between the two other women and connects them with her strange powers (or vivid imagination).
The juxtaposition of easy cultural whipping boys like Walmart and Céline Dion suggests an obvious satire of commercialism, but Choinière takes us in a less hackneyed direction. Céline Dion, here, is not a figure of fun, but a genuine beacon of hope for the hopeless, someone who speaks to a class of people mocked by the elites, even those who claim to speak for them. Through Bliss, Choinière subtly seems to suggest that there’s other a small distance between the snobbish belittling of Céline fans to full-on bullying and ultimately more violent forms of dehumanization.
With a stylistic, nightmarish script that builds a transatlantic bridge between the work of the U.K.’s Martin Crimp and Quebec’s Larry Tremblay, Bliss gets a strong, promise-showing production by Steven McCarthy, who originally staged it at the National Theatre School.
My only real quibble: while Churchill’s translation is solid, it is full of Britishisms like “newspaper cuttings”, “changing queues” and “press officer.” Since McCarthy has cast French-Canadian actors in the roles (plus himself), this has the unfortunate effect of making it seem as if all the characters learned English from Jacques Parizeau.
Perhaps because of the attention heaped on Homegrown, Catherine Frid’s Prime-Minister-disapproved play about of convicted terrorist Shareef Abdulhaleem, this year’s edition of the SummerWorks festival has seemed themed around the question: How do we justify violence to others and to ourselves? There’s more to be gleaned on this subject from Euripides and Tolstoy.
In his play Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides dramatised the moment in the Trojan War where King Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order for raise favorable winds to blow the Greek fleet onwards to Troy.
In Nicolas Billon’s adaptation – an odd mix of prosaic and poetic – Agamemnon and his brother Menaleus become so convinced of the righteousness of this killing that they see Iphiginia transformed into a deer right before her throat is slit. In the original, the Gods really do substitute an animal for Iphigenia and spirit her away, but here this miracle is called into doubt.
