October 08, 2004 -

“I count HA ha!... among the masterpieces of contemporary theatre.” -- Jean-Pierre Ronfard

Ottawa, Ontario -- “Ladies and gentlemen, ladles and jellyspoons!” The National Arts Centre (NAC) French Theatre invites you to an elephantine celebration of dizzying improbability, a super-size word game where “everyone speaks Chinese in their own language”, a sardonic comedy sprung from the febrile imagination of acclaimed Quebec playwright Réjean Ducharme and brought to a rolling boil by Frédéric Dubois, one of the hottest young directors on the contemporary theatre scene.

It’s the party to end all parties, laced with malice and misunderstanding — “phone for everyone!” in the company of a loony (Reynald Robinson), a slattern (Lorraine Côté), a souse (Yves Amyot) and a space cadet (Marie-Christine Lavallée), two rough and ready couples who get their kicks by teasing and taunting each other in a war of words where anything goes. Don’t miss out: to reserve your “comfo” seats, visit the NAC Box Office or call Ticketmaster today!

HA ha !…, or the desecration of the everyday
Slouched in his La-Z-Boy, his finger glued to the “record” button of his cassette machine, Roger (Reynald Robinson), a spineless pseudo-poet, is immortalizing his “Bedits Discours” (“liddle speeches”) in a personal crusade to jumble up the world, his own life and other people’s by “interdeforming” language. Sophie (Lorraine Côté), his energetic and well-upholstered partner, does her best to survive in this “Eden of dead ends,” but things take a nasty turn when their hard-luck friends Bernard (Yves Amyot) and Mimi (Marie-Christine Lavallée) suddenly show up on the doorstep. Bernard, whose campaign to destroy himself with ever-increasing doses of vodka shows every sign of succeeding, casually aligns himself with Roger’s generalized destructiveness. As for Mimi—decent, hypersensitive, generous to a fault, everybody’s ideal victim—she’s completely lost: she’ll never quite figure out that she has become the target in a murderous game that will be played out to the bitter end.

HA ha !… premiered at Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) in 1978, directed by Jean-Pierre Ronfard, and won the 1982 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. In this lacerating comedy, playwright Réjean Ducharme paints an unforgiving portrait of our society’s obsession with consumerism (material and emotional) by focusing on the couple, private life, and the strange appeal of indifference. HA ha!... is all about violating the familiar. Rejecting authority, embracing the confusion of a life deliberately stripped of illusion, it is a corrosive depiction of the “tragic playfulness” that emerges when people mess with their lives and others’. In the words of director Frédéric Dubois, “it’s a not-so-funny comedy” where theatre itself takes as many hits as the characters in a dialogue that is at once fluid and grating.

Réjean Ducharme, playwright
Novelist, playwright, screenwriter and lyricist Réjean Ducharme is one of the most original voices in contemporary Quebec literature — and one of its most private and enigmatic figures as well. Besides two Governor General’s Literary Awards (in 1966, for his novel L’Avalée des avalés, published in English as The Swallower Swallowed, and in 1982, for HA ha !…), his many awards and honours include the Prix Gilles-Corbeil (1990), the Prix Athanase-David (1994) and the Prix national des lettres du ministère français de la Culture (1999). Both in his novels (Le nez qui voque, L’Hiver de force, Dévadé) and his plays (Le Marquis qui perdit, Ines Pérée et Inat Tendu), Ducharme distorts the conventions of writing in a gleeful and irreverent whirl of puns, double entendres, archaisms, neologisms, onomatopoeias, acoustical fantasies and other stylistic figures. Essentially theatrical, his language draws life from the performer’s voice and movements. A motley language, “magnificently bastardized and totally modern,” to quote Jean-Pierre Ronfard.

Frédéric Dubois, director
Since he graduated in 1999 from the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec, Frédéric Dubois has carved out an enviable reputation on the Quebec theatre scene. His directing credits include Larry Tremblay’s Téléroman, Eugene Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and Jean‑Pierre Ronfard’s Vie et Mort du roi boiteux. Dubois is the founding artistic director of the Théâtre des Fonds de Tiroirs, winner of the 2001 Masque for “Discovery of the Year” for his production of Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro. NAC audiences will remember his magical staging of Marie-Josée Bastien’s La Librairie. A big fan of Réjean Ducharme, Frédéric Dubois directed a caustic 1999 production of Le Cid maghané. He comments, “Le Cid maghané is even more satirical than HA ha!... Ducharme’s arena will always be the bitter struggle between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood, which to him is a perverse place indeed. It’s inevitable.”