For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, a play by Michel Tremblay, is currently being staged at the National Arts Centre (N.A.C.) in Ottawa, Ontario, as part of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival. (If you’re interested in attending the show, today or tomorrow – Tuesday, June 11 – will be your last chance. More information here.)

Lorne Cardinal plays playwright Michel Tremblay and Margo Kane is his beloved if exasperating mother, Nana, in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again.
Photograph by Handout photo, Magnetic North

Patrick Langston recently wrote two reviews of the play for the Ottawa Citizen, (June 3 and June 8, 2013). The following are excerpts from these reviews.

Had Quebec playwright and novelist Michel Tremblay been a different person, how would he have fared with a mother like Nana?

After all, the lady portrayed in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, Tremblay’s affectionate memory play about his mother Nana, is a force of nature for whom hyperbole is as natural as breathing and who could turn any event, no matter how small, into a three-ring circus of melodrama.

Another child might have wilted under the non-stop barrage of this woman.

Fortunately, her flair for exaggeration was matched by her capacity for love, and Tremblay the artist flourished under his mother’s unintentional tutelage, his eventual passion for theatre at one with her passion for dramatics.

[…]

Tremblay himself traced his artistic temperament to his mother — a woman who had no more knowledge of art than she did of texting — in a wonderful interview with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel. The 2003 interview is available as a podcast.

“What she liked was talking,” Tremblay told CBC. “She was a big, big, big talker. She had a big imagination. I take my imagination from her, I’m quite sure.”

When it came time for Tremblay to write about his mother, says [Lorne] Cardinal, [who plays Tremblay in this production,] the playwright was “lovingly realistic; even when she gets crazy over nothing, he brings that in. It’s a loving tribute, warts and all.”

Read the full review from June 3, 2013, here.

Lorne Cardinal and Margo Kane star in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, by Michel Tremblay (translation: Linda Gaboriau), produced by Western Canada Theatre.
Photograph by Handout photo , Magnetic North

Pick the scene that’s your personal favourite: Kane is terrific in them all. Ditto Cardinal who plays Tremblay from ages 10 to 20 when, sometimes despite himself, he’s drawn in time and again by the force of this woman’s personality and restless imagination.

Directed by Glynis Leyshon, the show moves fluidly from funny to wistful to touching while sidestepping mawkishness or candy-coating Nana’s conniving and sharp-clawed side.

[…]

Tremblay’s mother died of cancer when he was just 20 but not before nurturing in him the desire to become the writer he is. Kane and Cardinal do that story proud.

Read the full review from June 8, 2013, here.