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Interview with Peter MacNeill
In Quebec? I don't think so. I think that the saying "Where are you going this summer? Balconville, " still applies. The working class are still in the same position. There are still the tensions between the English and French. If anything it's worse now. Do you think that any of the characters ever left Pointe St. Charles? No, I don't think Johnny ever got out there, or the rest of the characters. I live in a similar working class neighborhood in Toronto [Parkdale], there just isn't any relief. It's ongoing. What was the reaction from the Irish and the British audiences when you took Balconville to Europe? The Irish loved it. The Northern Irish seemed to understand the situations portrayed in the play right away. The British tended to intellectualize the play a little too much. They didn't understand the whole English-French thing. The Irish could relate to it in terms of their relationship between the Irish and the British. We were actually the last company to perform in the Old Vic theater in London before Ed Mirvish bought it. People asked me if I felt the ghosts [of the great performers that had played there]. I was too young and arrogant to pay attention to that sort of thing. Today I would definitely feel those ghosts, but back when you're young you don't think of things like that. We didn't have a lot of advance postering or publicity in England, so we got pretty bad houses. In Ireland it sold out, but in England there just wasn't enough advance [publicity] work done. It says in the program that you "created" the character of Johnny. How did the character development process work? Well, when I first read the play I didn't really feel that there was a play there. So we started working on it, finding the humour that was there. David [Fennario] is more of a politician than a playwright. David didn't welcome the humour. He was afraid that humour would undercut his message. We felt that we should allow people to laugh through the characters. They are funny in spite of themselves. Humour comes from the Quebecois flavor. We worked with David and would ask him if we could change a line here, or a few words here. I've known David for a long time. He was actually my paper boy when I was a kid. I used to get very angry at him for using theatre for political means. He always thought it was a bourgeois art form. When we played Place des Arts there was a an ushers strike going on. All of these ushers were part time employees who were all engineering students. They were sort of the bottom of the rung in terms of union priority. But David wouldn't cross picket line and consequently went out on the picket line to picket his own play. I thought this was silly because the workers he was supporting were going to end up graduating with engineering degrees and going to become the bosses he was fighting against. What about the people inside the theatre? Were they made up of the working class audience that David was trying to reach? Theatre always aims to reach the people. The audiences tend to be made up of more educated people, who may be working class, but as a whole their incomes tend to be a little higher. David wanted to shame people, to hit people over the head with his message. Theatre should be by the people, for the people. A lot of people went for the humour. It allowed people to see a little slice of life that they had never seen before. Often the reaction was "How cute the French Canadian accent is," or "How interesting their colloquial ways are." We've heard stories that the ending kept changing. How do you think the play should have ended? I always hated the ending. I thought the curtain should have come down during the fire, instead of trying to wrap it up. It was naïve and silly. The fire should have just kept burning. Not even a bow, just a curtain. Life goes on.
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