The curtain of the Bluma Appel stage slowly rises to reveal 14 pairs of scarlet platform shoes. They range from shiny knee-high lace-ups to ones that look like they were made out of a rec-room shag carpet.
That first glimpse of footwear is director Peter Hinton’s cunning way of introducing us to the world of Michel Tremblay’s Saint Carmen of the Main. They evoke at once the garish decade in which the play is set – the seventies – and the elevated boots or cothurni worn by actors in ancient Greek tragedies.
Unfortunately, before long they’re also reminding us that the term “stilted” derives from the stiff, portentous acting associated with cothurni.
Despite a salty new translation by Linda Gaboriau and a cast full of first-rate actors, this major revival of Tremblay’s little-seen 1976 drama turns out to be a solemn and lifeless thing. A co-production of Toronto’s Canadian Stage and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, it’s the sort of highly stylized show you coldly admire, like a beautifully chiselled monument to the Quiet Revolution.
When we get a first glimpse of the owners of those shoes – a Greek chorus of seedily flamboyant drag queens and prostitutes – we’re primed to witness, if not exactly Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, then at least a raucous, irreverent treatment of classical themes. That may have been what Tremblay intended, but in Hinton’s hands it becomes a sterile, symbolic work.
The ragtag chorus in question is gathered in the red-light district of the Main (Boulevard Saint-Laurent to non-Montrealers) to greet the triumphant homecoming of Carmen (Laara Sadiq). A French-Canadian singer beloved for her cover versions of country-and-western songs, she’s just spent six months in Nashville, ostensibly honing her yodelling style. Now she’s preparing to take the stage of her old venue, a cabaret called the Rodeo, to show the locals what she’s learned.
Only Carmen has acquired something else in her time away – the realization that she needs to write and sing her own songs. She’s about to unleash on her audience a self-penned tune that’s not about riding the range, but about living on the Main, one that validates the boulevard’s low-life denizens and speaks to them in their own language.
However, not everyone wants the Main’s habitués validated and empowered. Maurice (Jean Leclerc), the Rodeo’s owner and Carmen’s lover, has a vested interest in seeing his customers continue to drink away their sorrows in his club. Deeply cynical, he keeps the neighbourhood in line with the aid of Toothpick (Joey Tremblay), a black-gloved hit man who has a personal grudge against Carmen.
But Carmen is not to be dissuaded from her new artistic mission. And as she stubbornly clashes with Maurice, she becomes an Antigone-like figure, defying the established order with tragic consequences.
When it was originally produced in July, 1976, just months before the Parti Québécois came to power for the first time, Saint Carmen served as an allegory for emerging Quebec nationalism. Today, its treatment of indigenous artistic expression as a political act, while not irrelevant, has lost its sense of urgency. So, for the play to still speak to us, we have to be involved in the fates of its characters.
A grubby, realistic approach that played down the Greek-tragedy tropes might have done that, but Hinton takes the opposite tack. He emphasizes the classical structure in everything from his static blocking to Eo Sharp’s stark set design, based on the playing space of a Greek amphitheatre. We’re distanced even further by Sharp’s costumes, especially Carmen’s bizarre stage getup, a silver wig and skintight silver spacesuit that make her look less like a country singer and more like Lady Gaga doing an homage to Jane Fonda’s Barbarella.
The play is performed by the NAC’s new English Theatre Company, of which Hinton is artistic director, and includes some of the country’s best actors. Yet they have a hell of a time engaging us with their lengthy monologues. Only Tremblay’s cackling, over-the-top Toothpick and Diane D’Aquila as Harelip, Carmen’s devoted butch-lesbian dresser, come close to giving full-blooded performances.
There is plenty of surface finery here, from Bonnie Beecher’s sharply etched lighting to Allen Cole’s tastefully subtle score, but nothing that grabs you emotionally. Watching this Saint Carmen is like spending two hours with an elegant hooker who turns out to have a heart of brass.
Saint Carmen of the Main
- Written by Michel Tremblay
- Translated by Linda Gaboriau
- Directed by Peter Hinton
- Starring Laara Sadiq, Jean Leclerc, Diane D’Aquila, Joey Tremblay and Jackie Richardson
- A Canadian Stage/National Arts Centre co-production
- At the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto
Saint Carmen of the Main runs until March 5 in Toronto and March 16-April 2 in Ottawa.
Special to The Globe and Mail
