La Cantatrice chauve

The Clock Strikes Seventeen. In a middle-class house in London, Mr. and Mrs. Smith have finished their supper. By the fireside, they chat about the benefits of yogurt for digestion and a family in which everyone is named Bobby Watson. Mr. and Mrs. Martin then arrive and discover with surprise that they are man and wife. Suddenly, a firefighter then appears in search of a blaze to extinguish.

In this emblematic example of the theatre of the absurd, Eugène Ionesco uses wacky and ludicrous remarks to sketch characters who inhabit a universe where rationality and time simply do not exist.

Chanda Gibson stages this 20th-century masterpiece, a play that takes perverse pleasure in exposing the emptiness of language, the discomforts that make the modern West a place of “non-sense,” and the artifices that underlie human relationships. Here is an absurd world obsessed with communication in which characters say nothing. In short, a world not so far from our own…

With Sébastien Bertrand; Sophie Goulet; Geneviève Langlois; Pierre Simpson; Christina Tannous and Manuel Verreydt; Directed by Chanda Gibson, Scenography by Alexandra Lord; Costumes by Yvan Castonguay; Lights by Glenn Davidson; Sound by Ben Gibson; Stage Managed by Gabriel Dube - Berkeley Street Theatre, Théâtre français de Toronto, 2019.

“D’ailleurs, le décor, le son, et les lumières, amplifiaient le ressenti du public.

Deux fauteuils, deux portes, un gong, un métronome et une cheminée, étaient les éléments d’un décor qui n’indiquait ni l’époque ni le temps, de quoi se sentir perdu dans cet espace-temps. Le son et les lumières oscillaient entre bruits apaisants et inquiétants, entre lumière sombre et chaleureuse.

La mise en scène de Chanda Gibson a donc réussi à soulever tout l’absurde qu’incarne cette pièce.” - Mélissa Salé, l-express.ca, Oct 24, 2019.