It is around a one-legged crone, martyring her lady companion, and her new one-legged husband, who has just left the hospice, that this first play by Thomas Bernhard is constructed. A work of his youth, A Party for Boris already contains all the themes dear to its author. Madness, scathing humour, various curses, obsessive prattle, fascination with sadistic games of power and domination, lost childhood, the ostensible charity of the wealthy: nothing is missing from this opus with its ironically festive title. It is precisely this multiplicity of possibilities that interested Denis Marleau, who returns, after his brilliant theatre adaptation of Old Masters, to one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. Sensitive to the influences of Kafka, Beckett and Genet, which clearly appear in this text, the Quebec director wished to communicate this enraged and explosive language. A language that is developed by successive repetitions, that progresses in a spiral. Speech whose musicality creates a genuine complicity with the spectator, constantly surprised by the comic and ironic devices that allow him, for a moment here and there, to escape from the world-prison in which the heroine lives. In great proximity with Thomas Bernhard, fascinated in his time by the world of puppets with a human face, Denis Marleau has invented for this play and its final banquet that brings together a dozen legless cripples, human-sized dolls with faces animated by video projections alongside flesh-and-blood actors. A technological illusion that makes it possible to give a perfect account of this funereal, grotesque and poetic ritual, invented by the one who asserted far and wide, loud and clear that “everything is ridiculous when you think of death”. JFP
It was in 1970 that Thomas Bernhard's (1931-1989) first play was performed in a theatre: A Party for Boris, which was originally supposed to be called The Snack. It marks the new interest that the novelist showed in dramaturgy. Starting in 1962, he published a number of novels, poems and various articles that earned him both a scandalous reputation and an unconditional support from his Austrian fellow-citizens. A caustic and obsessed critic of his country's history, in particular its Nazi period, an adversary of the hypocrisy of family and religious conventions that stifled him and of the political world, which he found unbearable, he leaves no one indifferent. His theatre resembles him as to the themes he develops in it, in a unique, unclassifiable and immediately recognisable style, made up of repetitive speeches and admirably composed dialogues that border on a disordered and joyous burlesque. He remains the one who has so often said no to generally accepted ideas, who has always looked for “the part of truth in the lie” with an incredible lucidity. JFP
Distribution
With the Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon:
direction: Denis Marleau
translation: Claude Porcell
conception, scenography et video: Stéphanie Jasmin, Denis Marleau
direction assistance: Martin Émond
video: Pierre Laniel
music: Nicolas Bernier, Jérôme Minière
lighting: Marc Parent
sound: Nancy Tobin
mannequins and dolls: Claude Rodrigue
costumes: Isabelle Larivière
make-up and hairdressing: Angelo Barsetti
with: Sébastien Dodge, Christiane Pasquier, Guy Pion
Production
production: UBU
coproduction: Festival d'Avignon, Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), Usine C (Montréal), le Manège-Mons, Maison de la Culture d'Amiens, Espace Jean Legendre Théâtre de Compiègne et Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana)
avec le soutien exceptionnel: du Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine du Québec,
du Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, du Conseil des Arts de Montréal-échanges culturels et du Conseil des Arts du Canada