There has been a lot of buzz about Trudeau Stories, a minimalist one-woman show running from now until June 6th at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. Brooke Johnson, a Gemini award-winning actor wrote and performed the play as a tribute to Pierre Elliott Trudeau with whom she began a friendship in 1985 while she was a second-year student at the National Theatre School in Montreal. When they first met – at a fundraising gala for her school – the charismatic Trudeau had already taken his legendary walk in the snow and packed in political life. Then only 23, Johnson had a refreshing innocence that Trudeau surely found charming when he asked her to dance at that fundraiser.
Trudeau Stories weaves back and forth between short re-enactments of remembered days and conversations and snippets of old letters and journals read aloud. On the night I attended the show, Johnson, now 48, received a standing ovation from the nearly sold-out theatre. A week later, I am still wondering why.
Johnson’s play premiered at Toronto's Summer Works Theatre Festival in 2007, and was remounted in 2008 at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. Roy Surette, Artistic and Executive Director of the Centaur who “made a special trip to see it” said the piece “moved, delighted and charmed him” and called it a “sweetly remarkable journey of a young woman and the influence a particular gentleman has on her as she negotiates her way through life as an artist and an evolving, caring human being.” However, I take issue with his comment that the play provides “insight into the shy, thoughtful private side of one of our nation’s most glorified leaders and personalities.” A book I reviewed for The (Montreal) Gazette in 2008, Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose by York University English professor B.W. Powe – who also forged a friendship with Trudeau around the same period – is a far more compelling meditation on the more private, spiritual side of our former PM. Here is an excerpt from that review:
Their friendship began in 1985 after Powe convinced the former prime minister that the book he intended to write was going to capture him through a more metaphysical lens. For several years, they met in Montreal over lunch (usually Chinese food) to discuss ideas, family, power, media, politics, and poetry. Occasionally to compare “destinies” as encrypted in their respective fortune cookies. These lunch meetings, punctuated by the occasional foray into philosophy or literature, provide the basic structural backbone for the book. Linked together atmospherically rather than chronologically, they emerge like well-chosen brushstrokes on canvas, each further intensifying our portrait of him.
In Trudeau Stories, we learn that Johnson read Yeats to Trudeau, but Powe’s book features a seminal moment when together, from memory, they spontaneously launch into a recitation of Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” The latter does more for his audience in the “show – don’t tell” department, the trademark of a superior storyteller.
Usually, I have no argument with an author’s use of the raw material of his personal experience. Most of us do it, especially for a first book. But given how underwhelmed I was with the play (whether it can even be called a play is another issue altogether), I have to wonder whether the playwright had some kind of ulterior motive for wanting to mount it again, at this ten-year anniversary mark of his death. Would this timing help draw more media attention? Would it fill more seats in the theatre? I even wonder whether Johnson’s play would have been produced had its focus been someone relatively unknown and not one of Canada’s most enigmatic public figures. Would a lone actor in cardigan, blue jeans and work socks reminiscing about no one in particular have been enough to carry the play? Would her simple mime technique and comical footwork have met the requirements for good theatre? Would it have been enough to garner a standing ovation? I am not convinced.
On the other hand, it is possible to use Trudeau as “material” for a work of literature, as George Elliott Clarke did for his 2007 dramatic poem Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path which originated as an opera libretto, and I before him, in 2005, with my poetry collection Satie’s Sad Piano, which referenced Trudeaumania only peripherally to set the mood of the book. In neither case - nor in the case of the Powe book, for that matter – was the obvious piggybacking onto a known quantity tantamount to namedropping.
A couple of other things about Johnson’s tribute rubbed me the wrong way. First off, while Surette, Centaur’s Artistic Director, insisted on having Trudeau Stories at the Centaur because Montreal is “where the story began,” I found that the play had a very anglo, Toronto feel. I expected something more edgy and whimsical. Less safe. As well, more than once, I found that Johnson’s “Trudeau voice” bled into her own “character’s” voice, making me question her craft altogether. I also take exception to her earnest “admission” in the playwright’s notes: “I don’t want to tell you much – except that everything in the play is true.” Its pay-attention-to-this-record-of-our-time-together tone made me wonder whether she half expects her footnote in history to join the glut of archival material already in storage. Finally, ending the play in darkness with a crackly cassette recording of a 1992 telephone message left on her answering machine by Trudeau – a private document – was creepy and unsettling, perhaps even exploitive. It served no real purpose except to say, again, “Here is what I still have of him in my possession.” In the end, perhaps the standing ovation was not really for Johnson at all but for Pierre Trudeau himself, a collective act of respect for the man who fought vehemently all his life for a just society.
