Warriors

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Garneau is first of all a poet who calls himself an “écrivain
public.” He is dedicated to a kind of poetry that speaks directly to
the reader and so, with an almost unequaled energy, he has embarked upon
a long, varied career encompassing writing in many genres and media:
plays, songs, translations, and texts for film, radio, and television.
He was arrested and imprisoned during the October Crisis and in 1978,
when Les Célébrations was chosen for the Governor General’s Literary
Award in drama, he refused as a staunch Québécois. Louise Forsyth has
noted that his work often is a “cross-over between languages of poetry
and theatre.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in Warriors, a translation of Les
Guerriers, first produced at l’Atelier du Centre national des Arts in
1989, and in English at the Martha Cohen Theatre in Calgary in 1990. A
play divided into nine days, it is a script that easily fills the bill
as a “poem in disguise,” by the writing, by the typography, by the
laconic directions. Fortunately Gaboriau has a good sense of the
Québécois idiom and knows when to adapt rather than translate
literally: a little gem tucked into the author’s directions for Day 5
is her rendering of “un fou dans une poche” as “Sylvester caught
stalking tweety bird.”

The situation is a forced confinement of two ad writers who, within 10
days, must come up with a new slogan for the Canadian Armed Forces. The
two characters fall rather easily into the roles of thinker and goad:
“I [can’t] tell you what you feel, but you can tell me what to
feel.”

The dramatic tension lies principally in that one of the two is in
imminent danger of suffering cardiac arrest (will they complete their
task?) and that, fueled by Scotch and cocaine, both are able to call up
long descriptive litanies of destruction, death, and hopelessness. What
is frightening is the energy that goes into promotion and the
ridiculousness of what turns out to be “catchy,” because we know the
power of advertising slogans. One of the duo is credited with having
“vomited out” at the end of a think-tank session the famous slogan
of the egg marketing board, “Get crackin’ ” (in the original it
was the Association des producteurs de lait and the slogan was “le
lait c’est vachement bon”). Quoting the omnipresent
God-is-dead-Nietzsche-is-dead, one character wryly harps on the fact
that he always finds popular slogans “in the same toilet.” That they
are “selling” armament and using Scotch and cocaine and a load of
modern electronic paraphernalia as entry into the new “holy wars” is
profoundly disturbing. And perhaps that is the ultimate message of this
play, which calls for lights and projections to punctuate each of its
nine days with “BLACKOUT IMAGE BLACKOUT” or “IMAGE BLACKOUT
IMAGE.” Technically, therefore, one is tempted to see a link between
the production values of Warriors and those of Garneau’s highly visual
Les neiges or Le Bonhomme Sept Heures, although the furnishings risk
being gratuitous for Warriors, where the overwhelming impression is of a
measured sense of ritual and a rather intellectual climax.

Warriors is clever and disturbing although not preeminently dramatic.
Gaboriau has provided an extremely fine English translation.