La reine se recompose
Reading by Michel Ouellette
“I don’t want to go to bed. I want to stay up all night. Even in my nightmares. I want to stay up until the dawn breaks and crushes me with its light.”
- Français
- ≈ 1 hour · No intermission
In a 5à7 setting (cash bar), the NAC French Theatre presents a staged reading of La reine se recompose, a new play by Michel Ouellette, whose previous works include Le dire de Di, an exhilarating one-woman show performed by Marie-Ève Fontaine. The two are reunited here for a reading by the playwright himself—with the participation of the actor, who is in residence at French Theatre this season.
The play’s central character is Gabrielle, 71, who returns to the North for the funeral of her childhood friend Fleur-Ange. It’s the evening of the day of the funeral, and Gabrielle is getting ready for bed. She talks to Marc-Olivier. But he’s not really there; he’s a shape-shifting “ghost” who recalls the highlights of her life. A young girl, whom everyone calls Vilaine, repeatedly interrupts the progress of this “recomposition” through memory to talk about a wounded bird...
Playwright’s message
La reine se recompose. First image during a walk: two young girls on a bicycle in the summer sunshine. Second image: the girls on a swing. Third image: they are looking at a wounded bird. I imagined they were in northern Ontario, somewhere like Strickland (a hamlet on Highway 11, near my home town of Smooth Rock Falls). I saw again the little house at Departure Lake, near Strickland, where I spent my early years. I thought of the works of Élissa Beaulieu, which revive the past of this village that is slowly dying out. I remembered a song by Renée Martel, “Je vais à Londres.” It was this song that launched the trajectory of my main character, the queen who rebuilds herself, Gabrielle, the young girl who leaves her childhood home to fulfil her dreams. To “build” Gabrielle’s life, I drew some of my inspiration from the life of Marianne Faithfull, the singer who performed with the Rolling Stones in the 1960s.
In this play, I wanted to deepen my exploration of the relationship between author and character, a question that has been on my mind for a long time (Le bateleur, Le testament du couturier). Here, Gabrielle believes that a hand is writing her. During the writing process, I had in mind a line by Nicole Brossard: “The woman had run her hand through my life” (Musée de l’os et de l’eau).
I think there’s an element of self-portraiture in this play: “Gabrielle, c’est moi!” After more than 30 years of writing, I’m wondering what that might mean, what the impulse was that kept me going along this solitary (or even personal?) path. I write more like a blind man than an architect. I don’t know what I want to say. I listen to the characters; I let the thing find its shape, its expression, in an organic way. Then, in the end, it all slips away from me, it no longer belongs to me. A kind of offering to an audience or a reader.
