Kirjahaku

Rural Quebec in the fifties. A battered child, Maurice, has taken refuge in a fantasy world. Alone on the farm one afternoon, he invites his pet goose, Teeka, into the house where his bedroom and the bathroom become the scene of some of Tarzan's most terrifying adventures. His parents unexpected return forces Maurice to commit a desperate and cruel act of violence. The original production of L'Histoire de l'Oie, toured by Theatre des Deux Mondes in French, English, German and Spanish, represented Canada at numerous international festivals and garnered rave reviews and several prizes in Dublin, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Limoges, London, Mexico City, Munich, Toronto, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Adapted for television by the playwright and directed by Tim Southam, L'Histoire de l'Oie / The Tale of Teeka was broadcast in French and English on the CBC / Radio Canada National Networks in the spring of 1999. The production won the Banff Television Festival Telefilm Canada Award for Best Canadian English-Language Production.

May 1953. The Empress of France sets sail from Montreal. On the pretext of attending the celebrations marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an important mafioso leaves for England where he secretly plans to live in exile with his two sons. Aboard this floating palace in the middle of the ocean, the petty lord of the Montreal underworld must face the most important decision of his dubious career: will he sacrifice his youngest son for a safe-conduct? Le Voyage du couronnement, co-produced by Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal and Theatre du Trident in Quebec City, was nominated in the Best New Play category at the 1996 'Soiree des Masques' presented by the Academie quebecoise du theatre.

Fifteen years to the day after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Each sibling is facing a crucial rite of passage: Carl, the youngest, is to be married later in the day and it is this occasion that has brought the three of them together. Ambrose is losing his lover to AIDS. Victor, the eldest, has just left his second failed marriage. They have never really spoken with each other because they all have their own individual secrets to hide and because they share an ambivalence about the death of their father. Could they have prevented it? Would they have wanted to save the town drunk, dreamer, poet, fisherman, the man who embarrassed them in front of their friends and locked them in the sentimental prison of his poems? Are they ready, finally, to reveal themselves to each other and move on with their lives? Can they survive this unsparing encounter with their own manhood?In voices that interweave, alternate and play off one another with the exquisite lyricism of chamber music, the brothers reveal themselves as trapped by their father's inability to let his boys grow up and their own inability to accept him as an adult. Cast of three men.

Torrential rains have descended upon a small isolated village, and the overflowing river has washed away everything in its path. The mudslide has gutted the writing room, the place where a group of senior citizens used to meet to record their memories. It was after the exodus of their children that they began to commit to paper the events, large and small, that had marked their lives. Now their papers--fragments of life, scraps of memory--are strewn around the countryside, along with the fragments of their community structures, habitations and memorials. To reverse this devastation, they have to put everything back in order, they have to remember, restore and rewrite, while a group of strangers, young volunteers, pull down the physical remains of what is left standing. But what words can capture their lives? And for whom are they writing? In his determination to save the images of who they were, Samuel, the elderly leader of the group, is blind to the new reality around him. For some of his old companions, the flood represents an opportunity to make an unspoken dream come true; for others, it is an opportunity to confess secret loves, and to talk about the future.Assisted by Danny-the-Lonely-Child, the only child who never left the village, Samuel begins to realize that these fragments can never be restored--they can only be recombined into a narrative as fresh and new and real as the hopes and dreams of their original authors. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the Spanish flu epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The painter is to choose, among four local women all named Mary, a model for his work. The presence of the foreign artist, his choice of a local virgin to serve as a model and the frighteningly strange nature of his work will upset the lives and change the fate of the entire community. The town's doctor, meanwhile, has his own prescription for what is ailing the villagers. As superstition collides with desire, The Madonna Painter unmasks a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable. Loosely inspired by the events surrounding the creation of the fresco that still adorns the nave of the church in Saint-Coeur de Marie, the author's native village, the language of the play is not that of its current inhabitants.Bouchard's characters simply echo the medieval beliefs that coloured the imagination and shaped the destiny of all Quebecois, especially those living in its many rural townships until very recently, and inspire this story with their gossip about their neighbours, foreigners and the mythical marital spats between God and Satan. That fresco depicting the Virgin Mary's ascension was the author's ?rst encounter with art, with a foreigner and with lies, and Michel Marc Bouchard has said: "In order to portray that fresco, I became a liar and the people from my village became saints and martyrs, artists and models, lovers and misanthropes. I presented their legends the way a ?ea market hawker displays sacred objects that have been stolen and disguised for resale."

Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son, Francis -- neither of whom know Tom even exists. Arriving at the remote rural farm, and immediately drawn into the dysfunction of the family's relationships, Tom is blindsided by his lost partner's legacy of untruth. With the mother expecting a chainsmoking girlfriend, and the older brother hellbent on preserving a facade of normalcy, Tom is coerced into joining the duplicity until, at last, he confronts the torment that drove his lover to live in the shadows of deceit. The lover -- the friend, the son, the brother, the nameless dead man -- has left behind a fable woven of false-truths which, according to his own teenage diaries, were essential to his survival. In this same rural setting, one young man had once destroyed another young man who loved yet another. Like an ancient tragedy, years later, this drama will shape the destiny of Tom.In a play that unfolds with progressively blurred boundaries between lust and brutality, between truth and elaborate action, Bouchard dramatizes how gay men often must learn to lie before they learn how to love. Throughout 2011 and 2012, Tom at the Farm was produced in Quebec and France, as Tom a la ferme, and in Mexico, as Tom en la granja. Award-winning Quebec director Xavier Dolan adapted the play for the screen in 2013, with Caleb Landry Jones in the leading role.

Michel Marc Bouchard's latest play tells the story of Queen Christina of Sweden, who wreaked havoc throughout northern Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. An enigmatic monarch, a flamboyant and unpredictable intellectual, a woman eager for knowledge, and a feminist before her time, Christina reigned over an empire she hoped to make the most sophisticated in all of Europe. In 1649, Christina summoned Rene Descartes to her court in Uppsala to share with her the radical new ideas emerging from science and philosophy at the time -- ideas that contradicted long-held, faith-based views about the world. Astronomer Johannes Kepler had recently proposed the elliptical trajectory of planets -- including Earth -- around the sun, and Descartes himself contended, despite condemnation from the Church, that individuals, not God, determined their own destiny. Descartes's ideas about free will and reason appealed to Christina, who was struggling to reconcile tensions between her rational, thinking self and emotions she dared not name -- including her love for a woman.Rather than bow to pressure to conform to the expectations of a nation that demanded she give it an heir, the twenty-six-year-old queen abdicate her throne to convert to Catholicism -- rendering her ineligible to rule, according to Swedish law. Was this an act of madness? Or a bold gesture of autonomy by a modern woman born out of her time -- one whom the seventeenth century simply could not contain? Christina, the Girl King premieres at the 2014 Stratford Festival. Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

Quebec City, 1908. Two priests-to-be are ordered to deliver a letter to a controversial visitor to their city: the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.'] As part of her long career, Bernhardt - known to her loyal fans as "The Divine" - visited Canada several times between 1880 and 1917, most often visiting Montreal, but once - just once - alighting in Quebec City. It is this singular historic visit, about which little is known, that Bouchard takes as the backdrop for his play, exploring conservative and progressive veins in competition through turn-of-the-century North America, with a focus on Quebec, that province on the verge of great change. Michaud, the son of the province's minister of finance, is a theatre lover. Talbot, on the other hand has arrived at the seminary on the very day of Bernhardt's arrival in town, he comes from a family struggling with poverty and clearly has more pressing concerns.The two are ordered to deliver a letter from the Archbishop forbidding Bernhardt to appear on stage at any point during her one and only visit to Quebec City, on the grounds that she has decided to perform a play in which Adrienne Lecovreur "sings the praises of adulterous love" and "ridicules a man of the cloth portrayed as a plotting habitue of Parisian salons." And so the stage is set for a battle for the hearts and minds of Quebeckers through these two seminarians: the powerful Catholic Church on one side, and the power of the divine Sarah Bernhardt - and the world of the theatre - on the other. The Divine was commissioned for the 2015 Shaw Festival in honour of George Bernard Shaw and everyone who loves the theatre, and in memory of Sarah Bernhardt, "the woman who dares to say everything that should be left unsaid." Cast of five women and eight men.

Consumed by fantasies of opulent fabrics and women's high fashion, a young man desperately tries to restore his mother's tarnished reputation. Channeling Yves Saint Laurent, his idol and muse, Hugo sets out to right the widespread rumours about his mother, B atrice, by designing the perfect outfit for her court appearance. Through the story of Hugo and his mother, Michel Marc Bouchard explores the root of artistic creation and explores whether art can be a source of consolation.