THEATRE REVIEW: FOR THE PLEASURE OF SEEING HER AGAIN
12 Aug'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

STRATFORD – In a world of do-overs, a la BEING ERICA or even GROUNDHOG DAY, playwright Michel Tremblay contents himself in FOR THE PLEASURE OF SEEING HER AGAIN with a simple revisiting, creating a highly personal, even intimate, reunion for his late mother and for himself. Throughout most of the play, in fact, Tremblay maintains the detachment of a simple historian, presenting both mother and son in a light as unforgiving of their minor transgressions as it is accepting of their strengths. And as the Stratford Festival production that opened on the Tom Patterson stage Wednesday proves, that makes for theatre that is both compelling and entertaining.

It begins with masterful simplicity, as The Narrator, (played by Tom Rooney) takes to a stage furnished only with a splash of vivid carpet, a dining table and two chairs. The Narrator begins by shaping expectations, at the same time as he is very subtly beginning to shape the portrait of his subject -- a subject, he insists, who is familiar to us all, for all that she has never been written about before. As that portrait begins to take shape -- and as the role of narrator fades and Rooney slips with deceptive ease into the role of the playwright as a young boy, the stage -- and Tremblay's memories -- suddenly springs to life with the arrival of Nana, as played by Lucy Peacock.

Not surprisingly to anyone who has studied the women who inhabit plays like Tremblay's LES BELLES-SOEURS, ALBERTINE IN FIVE TIMES, and the rest of his impressive canon, this is not a mother in the tradition of the Madonna and child -- but rather a living, breathing woman, as full of vitality, humanity and emotion as the Montreal streets around her. She is already in full flight, horrified at having her washday interrupted by the police, after her son is caught red-handed in the midst of a boyish prank. As anger, embarrassment and parental concern war with relief, she milks the situation for maximum dramatic effect, using one childish act of misplaced bravado to foretell a disastrous end for her son in flight after flight of hyperbole.

And clearly, the young son is not only accustomed to her histrionics, but amused and entertained by them as well. This sets the tone for a chain of familial encounters delightfully unfiltered by the fiction in which Tremblay heretofore has been known to cloak the women of his family before launching them into the world of his plays.

With unobtrusive precision, he shows us how the mother's vision shapes her son, not so much driving him into a world of words and theatre as opening it up to him in ways even she can't really comprehend. A boy shaped by his mother's irreverent tales of family and friends grows to become a playwright and entertain the world with his own tales of family and friends, and finally, using that skill -- the gift she gave him -- to bring his mother one final joy in the only way he can, as he closes the circle.

Despite the fact that he seems utterly overwhelmed by the demands of the Patterson's thrust stage, director Chris Abraham recognizes Peacock and Rooney as a well matched pair of theatrical thoroughbreds and puts them through their paces in a translation by Linda Gaboriau. Rooney is particularly fine here, slipping effortlessly through time, while gently training focus on Nana's often caustic wit and the huge heart hidden in her seeming pettiness.

And while one might occasionally wish to see a little more of the character and a little less of the actor in her performance, there is no denying Peacock's skill -- a skill which always makes it a pleasure seeing her again.