La francophonie en cinq temps: snapshots of French theatre outside Quebec

POLITICS IS NEVER FAR FROM THE SURFACE. IT BUBBLES UP SPONTANEOUSLY AS YOU SURVEY FRENCH theatres outside Quebec, affecting decisions about what plays to perform, which language to hold production meetings in, and where to build the new theatre.

The main difference between French and English theatres in Canada is that the French ones are of necessity political, the companies scattered across the country to serve speakers of a language that is in the minority in overwhelmingly English-speaking North America.

"The fact that we're creating theatre in French is a political statement in itself," argues Claude Guilmain, the artistic director of the Theatre la Tangente, founded only five years ago.

A glimpse at a handful of French theatres across the country--in Winnipeg, Sudbury, Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa--shows that they pay lesser or greater attention to politics depending on their audience, as an entrenched Francophone community seems to need more discussion of their situation as a minority.

Among these theatres is the Cercle Moliere, the oldest theatre in Canada, which for 75 years has been serving the Franco-Manitoban community from its base in St. Boniface, now part of Winnipeg.

Paul Leveille, the theatre's administrative director, says the company produces plays by Quebec or Franco-Manitoban authors or translates American dramas. Cercle Moliere has also brought in three or four shows from Acadian theatre companies, including the very political Pour une fois which tells the history of Acadia. The accent is different, and Leveille says the audience carefully goes over the translations of Acadian expressions in the programme, but Franco-Manitobans can appreciate the political concerns of others in a minority language situation. "Their preoccupations are the same, the fight for preservation as a minority language," says Leveille.

The importance of Cercle Moliere to its cultural community becomes clear as Leveille explains that good theatre is Cercle Moliere's first priority and the second is "to maintain the pride, interest the youngsters."

Future plans include a new theatre attached to the Centre culturel franco-manitobain, with more seats--and comfortable ones at that--to entice older audience members: "We've got a lot of people in their 50s and 60s and they got used to sitting in wide, comfortable seats," says Leveille.

Another long-standing French theatre is in Sudbury, where the Theatre du Nouvel-Ontario has been packing in its audience of Franco-Ontarians since the 1970s, when most of the French theatres in Canada were founded.

Unlike the Cercle Moliere, which uses local talent, the Theatre du Nouvel-Ontario tries to hire professional actors and design staff, so the Sudbury company always pays the cost of bringing in actors and technical staff from Ottawa, or Franco-Ontarians who now live in Montreal, or Quebecois. "It's quite hard for professional actors to live in Sudbury," says Louisette Villeneuve, the executive director of Theatre du Nouvel-Ontario -- with devastating understatement.

Despite this, Theatre du Nouvel-Ontario commissions writers to create plays each year. "It's our mandate, the creation of new plays," says Villeneuve. Some of the commissioned plays are by Francophones from northern Ontario, but not all of them are -- Nuits d'Iran, one of this year's productions, is by an Iranian author now living in Toronto.

Co-productions between companies are common to the French theatres as they try to economize, and last year marked a triple co-production between Sudbury's Theatre du Nouvel-Ontario and companies in two other mining towns, one in France, and one in Noranda, Quebec. Violette sur la terre tells of a mysterious young woman discovered outside a mine.

"It's not necessarily the Franco-Ontarian experience but the northern Ontario reality," says Villeneuve.

One way that the Theatre du Nouvel-Ontario and other French theatres try to bridge their isolation is by networking with each other. The main association for professional French theatre outside Quebec is the Association des theatres francophones du Canada (ATFC) and the ATFC helps its thirteen member companies by serving as an advocacy group to remind government bodies of the importance of French theatre. To help its member theatres get to know each other, the ATFC organizes annual national gatherings, alternating between a theatre festival one year and a conference the next. There are also organizations for Franco-Ontarian theatre companies and the French theatres in the western provinces.

Politics matters less in Toronto, as the Theatre francais de Toronto struggles to produce original works in a city where audiences expect a Moliere and a Tremblay each year.

Francophones in Toronto are a fractured lot, coming from around the world -- Haiti, Senegal, Quebec -- and they have little in common with one other. The Theatre francais de Toronto also attracts unusually large amounts of Anglophones to its shows.

"I'd say 35 per cent would be Anglophone," says Guy Mignault, the company's artistic director. Because of this hodge-podge, the Theatre francais de Toronto relies on classical repertory plays such as those by Michel Tremblay that the audience knows. "I like to call it a company that touche a tout [does a little of everything]," says Mignault.

This year the Toronto company is trying a mini-festival of more adventurous programming at the beginning of the season, partly to see how well the audience responds. It includes two plays originally produced by other French-language companies in central Canada.

"I know what they like, how far I can push them, and how far I would like to push them," says Mignault. He says their audience likes repertory but also wants to be surprised: "We've read and seen the play fives times already, but make it different."

Politics also takes a back seat in Vancouver, where the focus is on producing plays of a professional calibre at the Theatre la Seizieme, as the mainstage season is only five years old.

"B.C. is really interesting because we have the third-largest Francophone population in Canada outside of Quebec," says Craig Holzschuh, the theatre's artistic director. Theatre la Seizieme's Francophone audience is large but transient, coming from elsewhere (often Quebec) and staying a few years. "Francophones originally from British Columbia are few and far between," says Holzschuh.

To find actors, he looks for bilingual students in the theatre programs at the local (English) universities. In one instance they chose an actress and gave her lessons in French pronunciation. "So there we went for the better actor over the better Francophone," Holzschuh says.

Likewise, he tries to get the best technical staff possible whatever their language, whether it's a production manager who speaks little French or a Norwegian costume designer with none at all. As a result, production meetings are often in English. Holzschuh is proud that an actor in one of their productions won a Jessie, a Vancouver theatre award, by wowing jury members who only speak English. "We've been trying not to downplay the language issue but to up-play the artistic issue," he says.

A similar philosophy prevails in Ottawa, the hub for Francophone theatre outside of Quebec, with four French companies sharing one theatre.

For one of these companies, the Theatre la Catapulte, artistic director Joel Beddows explains that artistic excellence is the priority. Art is also the reason he as an Anglophone decided to make a career in French theatre. "When I was 13,1 saw Le Chien in Sudbury and said 'Wow, I want to do that!"' says Beddows, explaining that he was attracted by the history of different movements in French theatre, led by artists like Beckett and Ionesco.

Beddows seems to appreciate the politics behind French theatre, saying he sometimes casts Anglophones but production meetings aren't in English: "I have an ethical problem with that." Yet he argues that the best way to keep the French language alive is to produce good shows. "When you're in a minority situation, you become more reflective... Then you stagnate and assimilation takes over," says Beddows, explaining his preference for the new.

"To make sure our audiences understand that we're not community centres is sometimes difficult," he says, his statement contrasting ironically with the plan in Winnipeg to build the new theatre cheek-by-jowl with the cultural centre.

Thanks to its avant-garde productions and outreach at the University of Ottawa, Beddows' audience is mostly young and middle-aged adults in the 20- to 50-year-old range. "They like to risk, they like new works," says Beddows. Theatre la Catapulte's young audience eventually drifts away to the three other French companies in Ottawa, and Beddows once asked a former audience member at a production of one of the other theatres why she no longer came to Theatre la Catapulte, only to hear: "My boyfriend thinks your shows are weird."

From the avant-garde to the traditional, politics play a varying role in the different French theatres across Canada. Preserving a community's culture is sometimes less important than other aims, such as producing new plays, attaining a new level of professionalism, or making an artistic statement, but politics does indisputably play a role in our French theatres.

So what's in the fixture for Canada's French theatres?

Guy Mignault, also the president of the Association des theatres francophones du Canada, thinks the French theatres are becoming increasingly good. "I think we're just going to grow," says Mignault. "But if we don't work a little on the assimilation problem, if we don't keep on growing, if we don't go after a younger audience, there will be a problem."

As long, then, as there are French communities outside of Quebec, there will be theatres to tell their stories.

Susan Peters is a writer and francophile living in Toronto. Her first taste of theatre came in kindergarten, when she played a wolf.

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