Theatre review: Humour offsets vulgarity in André Gélineau's S’effondrent les vidéoclubs
The Québécois playwright’s script travels from the day-to-day to the characters’ daydreams
Frédérique Roussel. Photo by Todd Duncan
France Perras. Photo by Kristine Cofsky
Théâtre La Seizième presents S’effondrent les vidéoclubs in French with English surtitles to June 4 at Studio 16
Québécois playwright André Gélineau sets S’effondrent les vidéoclubs—which is having its world premiere in Vancouver—in the video store that was a pillar of his youth and of the village of Saint-François-Xavier-De-Brompton, where he grew up. Owner Sania (France Perras) is shuttering the shop for good in a month, business having dried up thanks to the Internet. Now and then she peeks through the blinds of the front window to look at putrid Lac Tomcod, in real life one of Canada’s most polluted lakes.
Shop employee and aspiring filmmaker Luc St-Pierre (Maxim Racicot-Doucet) is making a documentary of the store’s final 30 days, enlisting the help of his co-worker girlfriend, Marion (Frédérique Roussel). Karl-Éric (Yurij Kis) is the lonely loser who lives above the shop and visits multiple times a day, always overstaying the allotted 10 minutes in the adult section.
Gélineau draws parallels between the video store’s demise—one that Sania welcomes so she can move on to her dream of opening a day spa—and the lake’s degradation, extrapolating from there to speak to broader elements of the human experience, whether it be toxicity that can exist in people’s souls or relationships; the mourning of what once was and hope for the future, no matter how faint; loneliness and self-doubt; or the potential for all of us to grow.
And he does so through a combination of crass language (there’s liberal use of Quebec’s distinct brand of swearing—câlice, c’est fuckée—throughout) and vulgar concepts, the ugliness of it all offset by moments of comedy and warmth.
The script travels from the day-to-day to the characters’ daydreams, sometimes making viewers question which is which. Where it veers too deeply is into Karl-Éric’s porn addiction. The others befriend him because they feel sorry for him, essentially saying ‘Hey, he’s harmless;’ and sure, he reveals he has a heart, but it’s hard to fathom that anyone would be as kind to the guy who’s been caught in the XXX section with his pants down and has nothing else to do but salivate over video covers and jerk off with this curtains open for folks across the street to see. If anything, Kis makes the sweats-wearing loner sufficiently off-putting.
Jennifer Stewart’s design makes clever use of Luc St-Pierre’s camera operation, with live, raw footage of the doc’s interviews and monologues projected onto any of three screens. There are set pieces the actors move around themselves, from a box that at one point becomes Karl-Éric’s bedroom to the check-out counter equipped with a popcorn machine and corded office phone. Movie buffs will love the racks filled with titles like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ghostbusters, Dirty Dancing, and American Beauty; the adult section’s metallic-red fringe doorway curtain is a perfect throwback.
Under Gilles Poulin-Denis's even direction, Perras is a fireball as the foul-mouthed Sania, and Roussel’s Marion is convincingly sweet and sensitive as she tries to appease Luc St-Pierre and meet his amateur directing standards, to a point.
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