May 7, 2012
By Pat Donnelly, The Gazette - May 4, 2012Read the article "Wajdi Mouawad’s latest will speak for itself"
MONTREAL - [...] Meanwhile, at the Segal Centre, a vintage romantic comedy by Bernard Slade, Same Time, Next Year, opened Thursday.
It’s directed by Diana Leblanc and stars RH Thomson and Michelle Giroux.
Thomson is always eager to return to Montreal. “This is the only city that casts me in comedy,” he said.
His last appearance here was in Harvey, two years ago, also at the Segal Centre. So what do casting directors offer Thomson in Toronto? “Dark drama,” he replied, “deep drama, twisted drama, important drama, drama, drama.”
Take Wajdi Mouawad’s Forests, for instance. That was last year, at Tarragon Theatre. He played Douglas, the paleontologist.
Asked for his opinion on Mouawad’s work, Thomson replied that he’d only seen one other play, Scorched (Incendies), so far. But he’s already a fan.
“There is so much formulaic writing today,” Thomson said. “And there is so much grief and grievance writing. The formulization of writing from television is just infecting everything. It’s infecting theatre. And to see a writer who says, I don’t care about that formula-driven stuff and he heads off in totally novel directions ... You read Forests and say, these speeches, they are far too long, and why go back to the forest? In Toronto, sure, there were people who left at intermission, but the rest of the people stayed for the journey. He somehow gets into territory that no one else knows how to get near. You have to understand the desert of narrative writing in film and television. If you want art, if you want a culture, you can’t follow the formulas like that.”
Thomson sees Same Time, Next Year as a well-written play that has something to say about the absurdity of the human condition. “It covers all the topics, right? Marriage, children, infidelity, impotence, being grandparents, wars. For a really neatly put-together comedy, it covers all the bases.”
Thomson himself has been with his partner, Laurie Matheson, for 35 years, 28 of them as officially wed.
As the father of two sons who are currently working at underpaid jobs, he empathizes with the students who have taken to the streets in Montreal: “They’re talking for their generation. We have to listen to what they’re saying. We’ve had the sweet spot. They are going into the wage world with monumental debt. I think the students in Ontario and B.C. should be out protesting, too. I don’t think they’re spoiled. We were spoiled.”
When he’s not acting, Thomson is busy organizing a special international tribute to those who died during the First World War, to take place in 2018, the centenary of the end of that war. Two of his great uncles died in the war, two more died later from its effects. His mission is to “get all of the nine million names and present them on smart devices and buildings and stream then on the net so that their names will actually circle the world. I have nine countries so far who are very interested in it.”
About 67,000 Canadians were killed in the First World War and 173,000 wounded. Lest we forget.
Like Thomson, his Same Time, Next Year co-star graduated from the National Theatre School, only many years later.
Michelle Giroux’s last role at the Segal was in another romantic two-hander, Tryst, three years ago.
The first time Giroux and Thomson appeared on stage together was in an Ibsen play at NTS. He had returned to his alma mater to play the lead, while she was one of the undergraduates playing townspeople on the set.
Giroux wasn’t relegated to crowd scenes for long. Shortly after graduating from NTS, she was playing lead roles at the Stratford Festival, where she remained for 9 seasons and ended up marrying one of her co-stars, actor Graham Abbey. (The romance ignited during Love’s Labour’s Lost.)
“I loved my time in Stratford,” Giroux said. But she wanted to explore the possibilities of film. “I find that the two mediums kind of teach you about each other.”
Now she’s eagerly awaiting the release of her first feature film, Blood Pressure, directed by Sean Garrity. “It’s about a suburban housewife who is married, has two teenage children and her marriage has reached a plateau,” she said. “There’s a theme here.”
Same Time, Next Year continues at the Segal Centre through May 20. Call 514-739-7944 or visit segalcentre.org