What is it with Quebecois drama? While the Scottish connections to the wave of writers from those shores are, frankly, overplayed in an all too spurious and unnecessary manner, that it's allowed home-grown audiences the privilege of tapping into such raw emotional power emanating from the pens of Michel Tremblay and Daniel Danis is enough in itself. Now comes Jeanne-Mance Delisle's 1976 piece, a furious work of dysfunction and destruction that ripped the Stellar Quines company asunder before rehearsals of their new production even began.
In backwoods Abitibi, where the depression has bitten deep, a family lives, loves, and laughs together in a garrulous flame of high anxiety and explosive mood-swings. Tonio, his wife, their three increasingly voluptuous daughters, and their mute son, Gerald, are barely getting by, but it's their poverty that binds them, a rare and spontaneous spilling forth of unhinged feeling. But when Tonio's feelings spill into the physical molestation of pouty and coquettish eldest daughter Pierette, and when she in turn betrays him, prison, murder and an unholy numbing towards denial ensue. Especially when the sins of the father are passed round and round the emotional garden in the manner they are.
Muriel Romanes's production rises above the messy public spat that was little more than a luvvies' tiff, and taps bravely into the ambiguous and dangerous world of familial codes with no holds barred. It whirls, crashes, burns, and bleeds with a blind power of spiritual self- laceration. Kern Falconer's Tonio, a stumblebum, living in the moment kamikaze coward and epitome of macho self-loathing sores, hits just the right skewed, pathetic rhythm, while the merry dance his family play soars out for redemption. Gorgeous. Tragic. Family. Life.
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