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A Third Appointment with Roy at the Theatre |
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by Danièle St-Denis
I have gradually distanced myself from him since the publication of my book. Firstly out of necessity, to enable myself to step back, and certainly to be in a position to explore other avenues. He and I have shared a sort of intimacy like, I imagine, that of a researcher and his subject, an artist and his model, a poet and his muse. After all that time I needed to detach myself. I consciously kept my distance even though I kept an eye on how his career was progressing. I watched him from afar, out of the corner of my eye. I’ve seen part of what he’s done since 2005, such as the unmissable Shake Hands with the Devil, without particularly trying to keep up to date with his professional agenda. This performance was an opportunity to re-establish contact, to confirm if I had been justified in writing so much about his characters and talent and especially to see at first hand if he was still able to move me as much as he had in the past. The Usine C was packed to bursting point. The atmosphere was as heavy as the snow falling outside. An excited audience, rather young, obviously well informed about the subject and content of the play. So much had been spoken about it in Montreal since the opening evening on the 18th March that no-one in the room was unaware of what we were about to see. I too was prepared for the worst, I had wiped clean the slate of my expectations and was ready to take whatever Brigitte Haentjens, Roy, Céline and Paul Ahmarani wanted to give me, as I sat quietly on the second row, the stage at eye level.
But all the rest remains intact. Roy wears his age marvellously well. He has always had a magnificent body and seeing him glide onto that stage with this natural charm that’s all his own, you couldn’t but be moved by the aestheticism of his mortal coil. I’m convinced that he knows it and has always known it. If only for the size of his shoulders, the length of his back, the strength of his arms and legs, he is a living hymn to masculine beauty. What’s more the various illuminated tableaux near the end of the play, when, alone on stage and blind, Ian is seen briefly in different situations, lying down, crawling, pleading, in tears or screaming in pain, all remind you of paintings, the light illustrating his body differently each time. But all these scenes are for exploring, in the space of a few seconds, Ian’s hell rather than the moving beauty of Roy’s body. He knows from experience and instinct how to make the most of it. Brigitte Haentjens does too.
As for his face, it
always bears his character’s stigmata of experience which almost
continuously removes all the The other remarkable aspect of this gift – the quality of his stage presence. I had forgotten this ability he has to fill a space. I think it’s to do with energy, charisma and relation to the environment. He literally radiates. Céline also has a unique stage presence but of a totally different kind. She is neither a voluptuous woman nor a beauty icon. It’s her generosity on stage that shines. She gives everything she’s got. She also offers Roy a partnership that is effective, tender and respectful. He is superb because she allows him to be. The same goes for Paul Ahmarani who, I confess, amazed and moved me greatly in his role as the soldier. While Roy plays someone who, up to a point, can internalise his feelings, Paul creates a soldier who absolutely cannot. I had compassion for him despite the dreadful things he does. He demonstrates with such intensity the love he had for his girlfriend, killed by the enemy under horrifying torture, that it’s impossible not to credit him with a former life of passion and tenderness. A life before the war. Even though he has become a monster he still has a trace of this previous existence. When he is kissing Roy, when he is stroking his lips or desperately searching in the nape of his neck for the smell [of his girlfriend’s cigarettes], or when he holds Ian beneath him in order to sodomise him, the young soldier displays a suffering to which you cannot be indifferent. This play seems to have been written to be interpreted through the body rather than through the dialogue. Sarah Kane’s text has a physical feel rather than a literary one. A work of youth, impetuous and impassioned, Blasté touches a chord through the emotions that drive the actors and the intelligence of Brigitte Haentjen’s direction rather than through the richness of the text or the import of its subject. Even though Jean Marc Dalpé did an admirable job translating it into Quebecoise, the lines remain the same, whether in English or in French. The text of this play serves to support the emotion, not to create it. It explains it, and in few words. All the power of evocation has to be translated by the acting. It takes a great deal of energy to bear such a message in their bodies, in the voices with which they deliver the shouts, sighs, tears, groans or gasps of their characters. Roy in particular has to submit to this onerous demand. Graphic expression of basic human functions is not easy to do on stage, and Blasté has them all – eating, drinking, sleeping, coughing, spitting, urinating, defecating, washing, copulating, masturbating, defending oneself, fighting, suffering, crying, waiting and dying. This play shows man’s excesses, the despicable inclinations that drive people to act beyond any morality, more cruelly than any other animal on the planet. But despite all the horror that she presents, Kane retains a glimmer of hope. Slight, it is true, but perhaps it takes on an extraordinary dimension in my eyes exactly because it happens in the midst of so much decadence. Tenderness survives in the middle of this hell and shows that in mankind there exists this pressing desire to love and be loved, come what may. In all these violent scenes tender gestures become declarations of love – when the soldier embraces Ian, when Ian occasionally kisses Cate - these rare kisses, always bestowed with a heart-rending gentleness, become a balm for these suffering souls. After two hours the actors had given all they have, the stage was smoking and strewn with debris, the audience disconcerted. At the bows they applauded but with uneasiness. As they put on their coats they talked quietly and sparingly. Traumatised, appalled, dejected, shocked, or perhaps simply deeply moved. As for myself, I felt as though I was coming out of a good film. Full of energy. No doubt due to the same principle as water finding its own level. I had absorbed all the energy that Roy, Céline and Paul had expended. My nature always drives me towards finding the best in everything. What I took from all this distress was the intensity of the impact of the tender gestures, Paul Ahmarani’s kisses and his voice, Céline’s hand stroking Roy’s brow and hair, the expression of Ian’s urges, Roy’s body greedily trying to satisfy his desires in a desperate attempt to stave off death. I took all that they gave, and especially these moments. It only remains for me to hope that, having realised his dream of returning to the stage to take up an enormous challenge, to act with Céline under Brigitte’s direction, Roy doesn’t desert the theatre again for so many years. Let him sail round the world with his partner and return to us to bring the house down by offering his talent once again in another equally powerful work. |
It
snowed in Montreal that Friday evening at the beginning of April. A big
heavy, wet snow. It seems that snow is always part of the scenery when I go
to see Roy in the theatre, whether it’s in winter or spring. I was
accompanied on this rarest of encounters by an American friend, a woman of
the South, intelligent and kind. I was dying to see Roy again.
As
soon as he appeared on stage I felt the delicious, comforting feeling that
you get on seeing a friend that you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing for a
while. The same body, the same gestures, the same voice, the same walk.
But not the same look in the eyes. Cinema and television are media that
crave eyes. Eyes that sink into our own. While the theatre offers us a
physical presence, it deprives us of that more intimate eye contact. It is
there but the actor needs to be sufficiently close for you to be able to
feel its full force. Even so I saw a profound change in Roy’s eyes. I
remember them in True West (1994), wide open, blue under the lights
as I wrote at the time, an expansive gaze that encompassed everything. The
expression of a guy in his early thirties, sparkling and amused, without a
doubt just like the character he was playing, Sam Shepard’s Lee, a strapping
mouthy lad, in the full enthusiasm of youth. Sarah Kane’s Ian belongs to a
different species of humanity. Roy’s look does too. Smaller, more aware of
his strengths and weaknesses. Under the Blasté spotlights his eyes
never appear blue or even green. They take on an indefinable hue, filled
with a disturbing sadness that nothing can erase.
softness from his appearance. Roy as Ian has the features of a man wounded
in both body and soul, sick, unable to resign himself to the inevitability
and utter disenchantment with life. He laughs only twice, I think, a
joyless laugh. Not a single hint of bliss passes over his face, even when
he reaches a climax. But on two occasions, only for a moment, his head
appears to be surrounded by an aura of serenity. Both times Roy is lying on
his back, diagonal to my field of vision, Ian asleep or unconscious. In one
scene it seems that Cate, the young girl with him who’s played by Céline,
strokes his hair. In the calm Roy’s face has rediscovered its
tranquillity. The angle of his brow and his eyes, the curves of his hair
reminded me of the paintings of Christ descended from the cross. What’s
more I have said from the start that Ian makes me think of Dali’s Christ, in
his painting of Christ of St John of the Cross. The same beautiful inclined
head, the same brown hair, whose waves might have been curls had they been
longer, the same resigned bearing faced with suffering, destruction and
defeat. The attitude of a man that horror has triumphed over. Roy, like
Dali’s Christ, appears to convey the same feeling. His interpretation of
Ian shows once more his inestimable talent.