War Cantata / Child Object

By Larry Tremblay, Keith Turnbull and Chantal Bilodeau

War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform him into a soldier impervious to pity. Without focusing on a particular battle or soldier, this harsh, intense, choral text builds the rhythmic power of words to expose war’s spiral toward hatred.

In 2012, SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques), in partnership with France Culture, awarded War Cantata the Prix SADC for best world play written in French, and CEAD (Centre des auteurs dramatiques) awarded it the Prix Michel-Tremblay for the best play written in Quebec in 2012.

Cast of 2 men and a chorus.

Child Object translated by Chantal Bilodeau With child as a blank page, a man sets about constructing his ideal companion manipulating personality, gender, and body. The child becomes the ultimate consumer good.

Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Oct 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889229075

Larry Tremblay

Larry Tremblay is a writer, director, actor and specialist in Kathakali, an elaborate dance theatre form which he has studied on numerous trips to India. He has published more than twenty books as a playwright, poet, novelist and essayist, and he is one of Quebec’s most-produced and translated playwrights (his plays have been translated into twelve languages). The publication of Talking Bodies (Talonbooks, 2001) brought together four of his plays in English translation. He played the role of Léo in his own play Le Déclic du destin in many festivals in Brazil and Argentina. The play received a new production in Paris in 1999 and was highly successful at the Festival Off in Avignon in 2000. Thanks to an uninterrupted succession of new plays (Anatomy Lesson, Ogre, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, Les Mains bleues, Téléroman, among others) in production during the ’90s, Tremblay’s work continues to achieve international recognition. His plays, premiered for the most part in Montreal, have also been produced, often in translation, in Italy, France, Belgium, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina and Scotland. In 2001, Le Ventriloque had three separate productions in Paris, Brussels and Montreal; it has since been translated into numerous languages. More recently, Tremblay collaborated with Welsh Canadian composer John Metcalf on a new opera: A Chair in Love, a concert version of which premiered in Montreal in April 2005. In 2006 he was awarded the Canada Council Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for his contribution to the theatre. He was a finalist in 2008 and 2011 for the Siminovitch Prize. One of Quebec’s most versatile writers, Tremblay currently teaches acting at l’École supérieure de théâtre de l’Université du Québec à Montréal.

Book preview

Foreword

In the Name of the Father and the Son

THE CONCEPT OF FAMILY has long been at the heart of Quebec theatre, but by the turn of the twenty-first century this concept had shifted. Children in contemporary Québécois theatre are alone. They search for their fathers while their mothers are there, omnipresent, multiplied, and powerless. Yet Larry Tremblay, who has always portrayed broken, reconstituted, and fragmentary families – as in The ­Ventriloquist (2006), where the protagonist has an incestuous relationship with her brother – had never before made family the main focus of his plays.

The two plays published in this book, however, deal with father-son relationships. In both War Cantata and Child Object, a father and a son converse, trying to understand each other and to untangle the mystery of legacy, in particular the transmission of violence. Like the orphans of the Quiet Revolution – a central hypothesis of Pierre Nepveu – the sons in these two plays struggle to comprehend all they have inherited from their fathers: the Quiet Revolution is first and foremost a story about orphan sons looking, almost desperately, not for a mother but for paternal identification (L’Écologie du réel. Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine / The Ecology of the Real: Birth and Death of Contemporary Quebec Literature [1999], 72). The theme of the absent father in Québécois culture is well known and has been discussed at length. But here Tremblay turns it on its head and lets the inquisitive and frightening voices of the sons be heard. Brilliantly dramatized, the chain that links fathers to sons and sons to ­fathers – an uninterrupted chain of failures, unspoken secrets, and hurtful words – refers to what Alexandre Lazaridès defines, in terms that perfectly summarize War Cantata and Child Object, as the tragic core of Québécois theatre: The fathers have been sons, and the sons will be fathers: that is the genealogical chain that Quebec theatre seems to revisit tirelessly, like a fatality ("Figures masculines: un état des lieux / Male Figures: State of a Place," JEU 97 [2000]: 34).

Tremblay examines fathers’ paths and, at the same time, their sons’ suffering. He wonders about the place of the child in our society. He puts on stage our discourses about the children we want to have, want to own, buy, transform, like so many consumer goods, discourses that have become obsessive today and have turned children into ­merchandise.

Further, War Cantata shows the transmission of violence through words. A father teaches his son how to hate the other, how to become a soldier who shows no mercy. The strength of Tremblay’s approach is in his gradual inversion of perspective where the son can no longer face his father’s violence. The collateral damage that results from this ­genealogy of hatred is the annihilation of filial love destroyed by fist words. Exploring themes already present in the short story The Axe (2010), Tremblay reflects on the destructive impact of words and their ability to incite slaughter. Every war, every genocide, is preceded by a discourse, a propaganda that infects the entire society like a disease, spreading through all homes, travelling from one mouth to another, from fathers to sons. Words precede action. They carry the hatred of the other. In The Axe, Tremblay imagines a professor of literature confronted with the violence of a pseudo skinhead, both men obsessed with the purity of words. In War Cantata, words of evil are transmitted within the family unit.

Tremblay continues this reflection in Child Object. A man has ­appointed himself father of a child that is not his, and teaches him about life while cutting him off from reality and the outside world. The child, who may have been found, stolen, or bought, is raised in a world ­entirely controlled by the man. Aspiring to make him perfect, the man shapes the child by whim, teaching him how to speak and showing him the world through videos. The result is a sadistic and skewed father-son relationship where the transmission of language is increasingly ­perverse.

Originally about children as consumer goods, Child Object is also a vehicle for one of Tremblay’s recurring obsessions: the duality of the creator and his creature. Present in War Cantata, this obsession questions the way the playwright breathes life into his characters – beings created from scratch, cut off from the outside world, and submitted to the playwright’s sometimes sadistic desires. Child Object evokes the motif of ventriloquism, which pervades Tremblay’s writing and writing practice, the child object being a doll-child capable of only repeating the words of the man who holds him prisoner.

The children in these two plays – great examples of what theatre characters can be – are representative of Tremblay’s writing process. Using material imagination,