Anyone who’s been involved in theatre can relate to those moments when things just go wrong.
It’s with these kinds of theatrical disasters in mind that the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario play “L'Encyclopédie de l'échec” (which translates to the “Encyclopedia of Failures”) was born.
France Huot, one of 12 local theatre actors who wrote and produced the show, remembers one instance in her long career when an audience member became particularly disruptive.
Her hearing aid was supposed to be connected into the mic system so she could hear, but it wasn’t working, and so she kept speaking over the actors very loudly.
“It was the most distracting thing I'd ever seen,” she said. “I felt so awful for everyone in that situation.”
Even as she spoke to Sudbury.com during a media call Thursday for the upcoming TNO play, which is being staged at Place des Arts Nov. 14-16, things weren’t going particularly well for Huot that day.
She was wearing a face mask because she had caught a terrible cold, although she hopes she’ll be well by the play’s opening performance.
Marie-Pierre Proulx, the play’s artistic director, said there’s “pretty much one moment in every production when you feel like the technical aspect of it all is failing you and you don't know if you're going to get through it. And more often than not, we do find solutions.”
“A bit meta,” said Huot, “L'Encyclopédie de l'échec” features a play within a play, one where everything is going wrong, much like the real-life experiences detailed above.
“This play is about a theatre troupe that was putting up a very specific play called “Nous sommes des pandas” (We are pandas), and they encountered a lot of difficulties with this play,” she said. “And so instead of stopping the show, they decided to do a completely other different show, eight days before they were supposed to present it, and it's a show about failures, so they've decided to embrace failure. So it's like an encyclopedia of different failures, like large, small and some also that relate to the characters and the troupe as well.”
In the disastrous play within a play, the characters face challenges including one of the actors breaking a leg a week before the performance (perhaps a play on the famous saying “break a leg”), and the theatre hall they were renting is no longer available.
“So all of those things are current things that happen regularly when we try to do theatre,” said Proux.
She said the idea of exploring failure is one that she’s had in her head for awhile, and is “rich with possibilities.
“We all live failures at different levels every day of our lives,” Proulx said. “It's something that we can all relate to in one way or the other or another … It can seem pretty dark, the idea of failure, but it's mostly a humorous show, so we're having fun with that concept, and we find it funny how, yes, failure can be pretty dramatic, but it's also something that you can laugh about a lot, and it's a great, great, great area to explore, the idea of laughing about ourselves.”
Failure is, of course, subjective, as what’s a failure for one person isn’t necessarily so for someone else.
“There's an entire scene of the show where they kind of stop their own show, and they're like, but what is failure?” Proulx said.
She said the idea of “L'Encyclopédie de l'échec” came about in March 2023, when there was a gathering of Sudbury theatre artists in honour of World Theatre Day.
Disheartened by the loss of post-secondary theatre education locally with the discontinuation of Thorneloe University’s theatre program, and the weakened state of the arts following the pandemic, “it was kind of a rough time to be an artist in the North.”
From this gathering was born Collectif Vivarium, the group of theatre artists who have now gone on to write and produce “L'Encyclopédie de l'échec.”
“There was that, that kind of general feeling of things that are failing us, but the collective desire to get together and help each other and do something,” Proulx said.
“So we decided, ‘OK, why don't we do a show? Why don't we put the Sudbury artists that are here and now and that want to play and live and act in Sudbury on the stage, and what if we explore that theme of failure that's kind of around us?’”
The involved artists are: Marie-Pierre Proulx, Isaac Adams, Maxime A. Cayouette, Antoine Côté Legault, France Huot, Michel Laforge, Éric Lapalme, Caroline Raynaud, Raphaël Robitaille, Alex Tétreault. Chloé Thériault and Joël Giroux.
If you’d like to take in the show, it runs Nov. 14-16 at Place des Arts, with English subtitles available in the 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14 show and the 2:30 p.m. Nov. 16 show. Purchase tickets online here.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.