“Pièces En Un Acte” by André Castelain de la Lande

Pièces en Un Acte is a sampling of the work of André Castelain de la Lande. De la Lande immigrated from Belgium in 1894, taught French in Winnipeg, helped to found Le Cercle Molière in 1925, and, during the thirties, wrote about fifty playlets, evidently for use in the classroom or in the context of amateur theatricals. Editions des Plaines has here published nine of these, to make available a sampling of Franco-Manitoban plays of the era, and in the hope that the plays will be valuable to educators, for discussion and for school performance.

They are definitely suitable for this purpose. De la Lande’s plays offer a refreshing change from all those historical Manitoban plays dependent on pageantry, hours of dialogue about our long suffering forefathers, elaborate staging and large casts. They are different because of their format and content. Their simplicity permits staging in a classroom with very little effort on the teacher’s part. The plays are short (each taking only about fifteen minutes to perform), very active (both physically and verbally), humorous, and entertaining. All require few props and costumes, and any of these not available could easily be improvised.

De la Lande’s subjects are drawn from everyday life: parental authority, the joys and frustrations of budding romance, struggling newlyweds, misers, overprotective parents and so on. Of course, many playwrights have written about these same subjects, often with more literary success than de la Lande, but what he has wittily achieved in these little domestic farces is to turn the everyday into the gloriously silly. In “Trop de Zèle Nuit”, a husband and wife shower each other with excessively sentimental endearments before misunderstanding brings disaster:

GENEVIÈVE: Te voilà, mon chéri.
GASTON: Oui, me voilà, ma poulette adorée.
GENEVIÈVE: Petit tire-bouchon de mes soupirs.
GASTON: Colombe des rêves d’argent.
GENEVIÈVE: Mon petit coq-en-pâte.
GASTON: Mon rayon de soleil a-t-il pris son petit café au lait et son biscuit?
GENEVIÈVE: Et mon gros loup a-t-il pris son thé au lait et son petit pain doré?
GASTON: Que va faire mon petit chou d’amour pendant que je suis au bureau?

In some respects, these are classic little folk farces: plots turn on standard farcical events (misunderstandings, romantic scheming) and the outcome is frequently slapstick. They follow in the tradition of Molière’s early plays, even to the stock one-dimensional characters. While they may be irritating to a reader in large doses, their manic energy and absurd obsessions make them great fun to watch or play.

None of the characters is a Hedda Gabler or an uncle Vanya (even a Sganarelle or Scapin). They are not finely drawn or psychologically complex. But this simplicity is advantageous in the classroom, as de la Lande’s characters can be drawn fairly accurately and objectively from the text with a minimum of theatrical experience on the students’ part.

De la Lande’s teaching background would suggest that he wrote these farces as classroom aids in the instruction of French as a second language and they can still be used for that purpose. The dialects, very often used to distinguish class and status, may cause some initial difficulty for the learner. But they also offer a change of routine and patterns which would introduce the students to idiomatic French in an entertaining manner.

Actually, a word of caution is in order to teachers and directors who might wish to use de la Lande’s scripts. Because these are period plays, they reflect attitudes and values of their time. Racist and sexist slurs are common in his writing and what might have been considered an amusing joke then, now may be considered generally unacceptable. Again in “Trop de Zèle Nuit”, a travelling salesman of patent medicines sells an elixir called “Négropanserfoie”, which is made from the blood and entrails of black people. Not too funny.

While some of the plays would be suitable for pedagogical purposes, one would reluctantly recommend the collection for an evening’s read. The first two plays are entertaining and amusing, the third a little less so, and each of the remaining six progressively less. It isn’t that the first two are superior to or any different from the others. On the contrary, they are all extremely similar, if not repetitious, in their presentation and style. One has only to read two or three to catch on to the patterns and rhythms; the rest become predictable and somewhat dull. The stillness that could be so attractive in performance becomes, after awhile, a tedious and prolonged joke. ♦

Denise Browne, a Winnipeg writer and translator, is a frequent contributor to Arts Manitoba.