Something very special happened tonight: Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival presented the world premiere of French-Canadian dramatist Michel Trembley's For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again newly translated into English by Linda Gaboriau. I read new plays in manuscript and see many of all sorts each year, but I seldom see a truly beautiful play; this one is unforgettably beautiful.
With deceptively simple plotting, Trembley has created a very personal memoir of his mother, presenting her in scenes with a narrator, who plays Trembley himself. We see them interacting as the young man grows from teenager to young adult and lets us visit his mother in her typically harshly critical, supportive, hilarious, witty, and always over-the-top command. He ends the reminiscence with a theatrical, loving fantasy to provide his dying mother with a fitting exit from pain and beyond death.
I won't spoil the experience with any attempt to describe their interaction, except to say that it is delightful and moving in a way that seems to connect to each of us individually.
The designers live up to the final fantasy remarkably in the very limited black-box stage of the small Studio Theatre. Chris Abraham directs with sure but modest affection. Tom Rooney narrates and acts the playwright/son with empathetic mastery.
Lucy Peacock, Stratford's beautiful longtime leading lady, has been startling us recently playing deliciously frumpy comic characters. Here she creates a unique character brilliantly, giving magnificent pleasure in bringing the most important person in the playwright's world back to life to light up ours.
