Haunted Legacy

Canadian theatre has always captured the public’s imagination, both domestically and abroad, far less than Canadian literature and music has. By the 1970s, artists such as Joni Mitchell, Burton Cummings and Leonard Cohen were already successful at home and around the world. At the same time, Canadian theatre was still in its infant stages. Theatre history texts cite Theatre Passe Muraille’s collective creation The Farm Show and David French’s coming-of-age tale Leaving Home, both from 1972, as the two seminal works of Canadian theatre. While success rates in Canadian arts and culture have always been a contentious topic, it is at least clear that the particularly local flavour of these plays was at least one factor that barred their export.

However, in recent years, this trend has changed. The productions of Robert Lepage’s Quebec-based company Ex Machina developed an international audience in the mid 1990s. Several years later, plays by the likes of Michael Healey, Judith Thompson and Morris Panych were produced in the United States, Europe and even Japan. And right now it is Montreal playwright Wajdi Mouawad who is earning the greatest notoriety abroad.

While he is the author of various stand-alone plays, Mouawad’s tetralogy Le sang des promesses (The Blood of Promises) is the primary source of his popularity. Begun in 1997 and completed earlier this year, the cycle is composed of Littoral (Tideline), Incendies (Scorched), Forêts and Ciels.

In the past decade Mouawad has been showered with many honours for these texts. In 2000 he was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award, drama category, for Littoral. In 2002 he was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres in France. In 2004 he was awarded the Prix de la Francophonie for his body of work and in 2005 he declined the Molière Award. In September 2007 he was appointed the director of French theatre for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. But perhaps the most impressive of Mouawad’s honours is this year’s presentation by Festival d’Avignon of remounts of the first three plays of the tetralogy (Tideline, Scorched and Forêts) followed by the world premiere of the final instalment, Ciels.

A study of the first two texts in the series—the only two currently translated into English—reveals why Mouawad has quickly risen to such prominence. While the plots of the four plays are unconnected, they are thematically linked by what Mouawad identifies in the introduction to Scorched as “the question of origins.” Tideline and Scorched both exemplify this theme. Their plots focus on young people who are haunted by a mystery from their past and must go on a journey to solve this mystery and in the process discover who they truly are. While this theme has many literary predecessors it is also a particularly 21st-century construction. Many young people today live distanced from their heritage and family narratives. They may have left their homeland at an early age, have been raised by only one parent and not know the other, be of mixed race or have fled a war-torn country. Any of these scenarios can trigger a desire for self-knowledge.

In Tideline, Wilfrid receives a phone call in the middle of the night informing him of his father’s passing. After identifying the body at the morgue, Wilfrid realizes he does not know where his father should be buried. His mother died giving birth to Wilfrid and is buried in her wealthy family’s crypt. His father had been devoted to his mother so Wilfrid visits his mother’s family to request a space for his father. They reply that the crypt is full. So Wilfrid travels with the corpse to his father’s birthplace and seeks space in the local cemetery, only to be told that it is also full. He encounters a series of local misfits who also carry the weight of the deceased with them. Ame mistook his father for an enemy and killed him. Sabbe watched his father’s beheading. Josephine wanders across villages collecting phone books and reciting the names of the dead. They all join Wilfrid on his journey to help him bury his father.

In the introduction to Tideline Mouawad recounts a “thirst for ideas” as his catalyst in writing the play. And while he undoubtedly quenches this, it is his handling of these ideas that shows Tideline is a warm-up act for Scorched. In drama it is always best to let the audience forge the ideas themselves out of the images, words and juxtapositions they are offered. Mouawad succeeds in this with his approach to mortality: the full cemeteries and the secondary characters haunted by the past combine to create a powerful image of a living humanity far outweighed in number by those beyond the grave, constantly feeling the pressure to honour the dead and answer their demands. But in terms of the self- knowledge sought by Wilfrid, Mouawad resorts to heavy-handed tactics. Throughout the script Wilfird engages with two imaginary characters who are used as foils to provoke him into analyzing thoughts and intentions. One is a film director, who follows him around and comments on the visual aspects of Wilfrid’s journey. The other is the Arthurian knight who charges on stage wielding a broadsword whenever Wilfrid is threatened. The idea behind the knight is that Wilfrid continues to hold onto his childhood crutches to help him through life:

It is in Scorched that Mouawad does not tell us the monsters have become too powerful—he shows us, and to great effect. The second play in the cycle also begins with the death of a parent. Twins Janine and Simon are bequeathed a challenge in their mother Nawal’s will: to find their absent father and a brother they never knew they had. Before her death Nawal, a victim of abuse from a war-torn country, one day stopped talking while watching International Criminal Court proceedings concerning her country’s turmoil. She never spoke again and the twins want to know why. Mouawad, who was born in Lebanon and came to Canada in the 1960s to flee war, is no doubt familiar with these types of stories. The twins head to their home country and learn the horrible realities of war and how these atrocities play an inextricable role in their family narrative.

Janine, who is a math teacher, at one point explains to her students that graph theory is “dealing with insoluble problems that will always lead to other problems, every bit as insoluble.” Later in the script, in a flashback scene, a doctor explains to Nawal’s friend Sawda that refugees stole children due to an endless chain of events that no one can now seem to recall. Throughout Scorched Mouawad creates many instances like these, where violence is shown to feed on itself in a cyclical nature. He never attempts to provide a solution, but rather highlights the individual’s need to understand these atrocities:

The dramatization of the atrocities of the latter part of the 20th century is an ambitious task to take on. In this sense, the playwright Mouawad can most easily be compared to is Tony Kushner, the author of the epic Angels in America. Kushner managed to articulate something that had hit critical mass but had never been cogently articulated in dramatic form before—the tragedy of AIDS in America. Likewise with Mouawad: the stories of Middle Eastern and Balkan devastation have been in the news for many years, but few artists have endeavoured to harness the bare emotions they exposed.

Unfortunately, Mouawad suffers from the same major drawback as Kushner: his grandeur sweeps away his rigour. In his eagerness to relay information, Mouawad regularly has characters repeat their points multiple times. The attorney Alphonse Lebel informs the twins that their mother has recently passed away: “Listen! She’s dead. Your mother is dead. I mean she is someone who is dead.” The attorney’s insistence and the basic information were likely conveyed to the audience and the twins by the first repetition. Also exposition is often revealed in a stilted manner. The main example of this is the character Lebel. As Nawal’s attorney, he reads her will to the twins in the opening scene and provides the pivotal information concerning her past that leads the twins on their quest. He often lectures in paragraphs rather than communicating with characters in brief sentences. For someone who is present in both the opening and closing scenes, he has very little stake in the outcome of the situation. As such he reads as a device instead of a person.

But these criticisms are mere surface blemishes that, when weighed against the importance and significance of Mouawad’s work, do not stand in the way of his visceral writing captivating audiences across the world. By addressing major themes in unrelenting plots, Mouawad has become the standard-bearer for a new, broader vision of Canadian theatre.