Maggie and Pierre:

A Dialogue with the Whole Country

You told me you wanted it all… four thousand miles of diversity, contradictions, and space.

—Pierre Trudeau, Maggie and Pierre

Near the mid-seventies, Linda Griffiths and seven other idealistic young women rented a station wagon, filled it with props and sleeping bags, and proceeded to present theatre in cities, towns, and villages throughout eastern Canada. Bezumba Theatre performed their shows in ad hoc venues to people of all shapes and sizes, recording twenty thousand miles on the beleaguered vehicle. They were in the vanguard but were not alone. In fact, they would become part of a surge of young companies that shared this same impulse for discovery, both of themselves and of the country’s inhabitants. As artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille, I was deeply caught up in this movement, and early plays such as The Farm Show and 1837 did much to help set the tone. It seemed inevitable that Linda’s path and my own would cross.

This happened in Saskatoon in the summer of 1975, where I ended up sharing some tpm collective techniques for a co-production with 25th Street Theatre in a play about the Saskatchewan scene entitled If You’re So Good, Why Are You In Saskatoon? Linda was with the company and she took to the new way of working brilliantly. Her research was rich and passionate and her improvs would focus on the singular, the unusual, and, occasionally, the magical. She seemed fearless as a performer and I remember to this day her piece on the spirit of the Bessborough Gardens, where she melded history and gargoyles into a seamless narrative. In many ways it set the mould for our future collaborations.

Fast forward to Montreal in 1978, where Passe Muraille was taking on the whole separatist phenomenon. Between us by that point Linda and I had done at least five more collectives—either with each other or separately—but none prepared us for the challenge of presenting a play in our mangled French for the indépendantiste audiences of Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui. It was called Les Maudits Anglais, a favourite insult of the English by French Quebec. It would call on all the political savvy and theatre survival techniques the company could muster. In one scene Linda played a kind of puppet version of our prime minister. It was startling to me because she revealed an aspect of Trudeau that nobody had yet noticed: his feminine side. “If you can do Margaret half as effectively, you have yourself a one-man show,” I proclaimed. Linda required a year of thinking about it to agree.

I now know why. Looking back on the process, I see how she had to summon every aspect of herself for this play: the protofeminism of the Bezumba Company, the magic of the gargoyles, the politics from Maudits Anglais. And that was only the starting point. Our rehearsal room became research central for a crash course on political science and Jungian psychology. Every idea was tried in an improv. Characters were created, loved, then thrown out because they didn’t fit the story (goodbye, Mrs. Michener); strong political personalities were brought in to argue every side of a policy; a lawyer came in to explain why we might be sued; the characters of Pierre and Margaret came into the room and started to weave their own particular spells. We found a model for our journalist while having lunch with Henry Champ, who told us everything we needed to know, then warned us against the cliché of a trench-coat-wearing character—his own trench coat hanging beside him, along with his clichéd hat. We stopped rehearsals for a week because the play was lacking Ottawa credibility. Linda travelled there and dug into the whole scene with amazing resourcefulness, infiltrating the Governor General’s Ball and dancing with Trudeau himself. “You must be some sort of student,” he mused charmingly when she tried to explain the play she was creating. Linda returned and the play took over. Her research was so rich that she could improvise sequences forty-five minutes at a stretch. Theatre was telling us what to do. We still had to edit, add brilliant sets, costumes, lights, and sound. But somewhere deep inside her, the play was already there.

And what was this play? Just like what the Bezumba’s wanted, it was a dialogue with the whole country. It previewed in the Backspace of Passe Muraille (too long, but a revelation), then went out of town to the welcoming arms of Saskatoon, where this hungry audience told us what we needed to know about the play—both by their reactions and their after-show comments. We learned that every audience felt that they owned Trudeau. By the time we returned for the Toronto opening, the play had a life of its own. It was critic-proof, but it had its own rules of care and maintenance. That looked after, we were along for the discourse. Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Blyth, Victoria, Halifax, Winnipeg, London, back to Toronto at the Royal Alex, and off-Broadway in New York City. Each city responded to the show in a unique and measurably different way. But they all needed to talk afterwards. About themselves, about the country, about… they needed to talk. Thank you Bezumbas and all the early companies.

—Paul Thompson

Paul Thompson is a playwright, director, and the founding artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. He has been named an Officer in the Order of Canada and was awarded the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. He is the co-author of Maggie and Pierre with Linda Griffiths.