Clash at the crossroads

Theatre: Clash at the crossroads Gratien Gelinas' Hier, les enfants dansaient PHILIP STRATFORD Gratien Gelinas is undoubtedly the most accomplished and all-round homme de theatre in Quebec. His long career on radio and stage stretches back thirty years during which he has excelled in every aspect of dramatic art, as actor, director, producer and playwright. This versatility and perseverance have gained him great and lasting prestige in a field where talent is notoriously quick to flower and fade. As Fridolin , as Tit-Coq, as Bousille, as director of La Comedie Canadienne and in half a dozen other incarnations he has known how to remain the apple of his public's eye, well-loved in Montreal, highly regarded throughout the province, and accepted as one of the most colourful and spirited ambassadors from French Canada in the rest of the country.·But such success is no easier to retain than it is to come by. So when a new Gelinas play was announced this spring, a great deal of curiosity was aroused. What new tricks did he have in his sack? Had he kept pace with the changes that had shaken Quebec since his last play, Bousille et les justes, in 1959? Could he repeat what had come to be known as "the miracle" of Tit-Coq which rocketed him to fame in 1948? Whatever was new in Hier, les enfants dansaient which opened on April llth at the Comedie Canadienne for a two-month run, one could be sure of one thing: that Gelinas would remain true to his artistic credo which he had stated this way in 1959: "The purest dramatic form (I don't say the only one, but the purest) is the one which expresses as intimately as possible the very soul of the public to which this theatre is addressed." This play, like his earlier ones, would be an indigenous product of broad basic appeal, a mirror reflecting French-Canadian faces. Conservative rather than avant-garde in style, it 40 would deal in local patterns and situations but move forward on a strong undercurrent of universality . What in fact was new in this play was that Gelinas decided to change the milieu of the action and by the same token switched from drama of character to the play of ideas. In Hier, les enfants dansaient we are no longer concerned with provincial Quebec, with la petite bourgeoisie and the labouring classes, the bulldozer operator, the salesman, the college porter at Saint-Tite, but with the well-established professional society of Montreal. The frame of reference is urban and political; the repercussions are national in scope; the conflict, though seated in a family, is the confrontation of two generations representing a social and political rift which is province-wide. In this obvious sense Gelinas had moved with the times, and this development in choice of subject parallels and reflects the most recent trends in the evolution of the new Quebec. A synopsis of the plot will show how consciously Gelinas sought to pitch his drama dans le vent. It is the eve of a federal election. Due to the sudden and unexpected death of a liberal incumbent, Pierre Gravel, a prominent Montreal lawyer, has been asked by party organizer Raoul Roberge to stand as candidate in his place. The news of death, first imminent, then a reality, then brushed aside by Roberge's urgent propositioning and tough appeals to power and vanity, makes for a hard, exciting opening scene. Gravel will not accept without consulting his family first. But before his wife arrives the high-pressuring of Roberge and a telephone call from Mr. Pearson have all but decided him. The one stumbling block to acceptance is his eldest son, Andre, a law student who does not share his father's political sympathies. His arrival is a bomb threat, figuratively and literally, to his father's aspirations, for he is discovered to be involved in a separatist plot to blow up a dozen public monuments across the province as a gesture of defiance and revolt against Ottawa. The head-on opposition between father and son Revue d'etudes canadiennes makes up the rest of the play...