It’s an apt title — You Will Remember Me — because there’s a good chance you will remember this play, currently playing at the Gateway Theatre, long after the curtain falls.
You Will You Remember Me, written by Francois Archambault and translated by Bobby Theodore, does a masterful job of exploring questions of memory, identity and dementia. But don’t panic, Archambault doesn’t abandon you in some depressing, long-term care facility. This tale is told with humour, love, passion and even intrigue.
The story centres around Edouard, beautifully played by Kevin McNulty. Edouard is a retired university professor, who still has a fiery intellect but is losing his mind to Alzheimer’s disease.
Clearly, there’s nothing funny about that — except there is. Edouard is witty and sarcastic, at least when he’s not scared and confused. And even his confusion can make us chuckle, which in itself says a lot. The fact we can comfortably laugh at an old man’s dementia speaks to the rich humanity and deep compassion with which he’s portrayed.
McNulty plays this character with truth and subtlety. He transitions from one extreme to another — one moment launching into a brilliantly sarcastic rant about young people’s obsession with social media, the next running into the woods crying for his wife — in a way that is entirely believable and so compelling.
The play opens with Edouard and his wife, Madeleine, played by Patty Allan, projected onto the back drop, giving an interview to a reporter about living with Alzheimer’s disease.
We soon hear the voices in double, then see the two actors at the front of the stage continuing the interview, live. As they speak to the camera (us), we see Edouard’s public face — the intellectual, Quebec separatist, professor. But we also see the strain, mainly in the barely repressed panic of his wife/caregiver as she tries to set the record straight, to let people know that there’s another side to all this — we don’t see what she sees.
In the next scene, the two enter their daughter’s home and Madeleine announces she’s had enough. Caring for her husband has become more than she can bear, and it’s time for their daughter to take over.
What follows is a curious and evolving potrayal of family dynamics and how memory and identity plays into that. What emerges are some touching and unexpected connections.
On one level, this is a play about a specific family dealing with dementia, but it also speaks to a wider social phenomenon.
Edouard is a separatist. He idolizes Rene Levesque and relives the night Levesque’s Parti Quebecois was elected, as well as the night it lost the referendum.
He’s horrified that the only thing that his young caregiver knows about Leveque is the fact he was short and smoked. What does it mean for a society to have a kind of collective dementia when it comes to its own history?
Archambault offers no answer, but he leaves us with memorable questions.
