Tremblay at the Abbey

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Summer, 2002 by Iris Winston

Ireland's national theatre presented its first Canadian play in January 2002, with a Canadian director at the helm. The European premiere of Michel Tremblay's For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, translated by Linda Gaboriau, was directed by Gordon McCall, Artistic Director of Montreal's Centaur Theatre.

"To have the opportunity to direct the work of the great Michel Tremblay at the Abbey Theatre is a dream come true," says McCall, who directed the English-language premiere of Tremblay's tribute to his mother at the Centaur in 1998. McCall's invitation to direct the Irish-cast production is the second stage of a reciprocal agreement with the Abbey. Abbey Artistic Director Ben Barnes directed Canadian casts in Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Centaur in the last two years. For his part, McCall said that he was particularly excited to have the opportunity to work at the Abbey. He recalls a seminal theatrical moment of thirty years ago when he saw Siobha n McKenna in a production of J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World at the Dublin theatre. "The thrilling experience of that production became a defining theatrical moment for me," says McCall, who is now in his fourth season at the Centaur. McCall has made cultural exchange a specialty during his 28-year professional theatre career. As the founding director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, he co-directed a national tour of a bilingual production of Romeo and Juliette with Robert Lepage in 1990. Six years earlier, he adapted his bilingual (English and Vietnamese) play The Promised Land for English and French CBC television as The Freedom Diary of Lan Tran.