BEAULIEU ELECTRIFIES IN J’AIME HYDRO
Investigative journey doubles as live-wire entertainment
Approach Porte Parole’s J’aime Hydro with caution: It might give you a few nasty shocks.
Take its jolting revelation about how much it costs Hydro-Québec to produce one kilowatt hour (around 10 cents) against how much the utility then sells it for export (around six cents). Or take the arguments about the absurdity of continuing to build massively expensive, environmentwrecking dams while a huge surplus of electricity sits around unconsumed.
It’s facts like these that send Christine Beaulieu, here playing herself, on an investigative journey into Quebec’s relationship with its flagship energy supplier in this latest piece from the documentary theatre specialists.
Perhaps the biggest shock is how such a potentially dry exercise in earnest didacticism has turned out to be such an entertaining live wire of a show. Partly, this is to do with the nimble visuals, including colourful doodlelike animation and vintage film footage. Mostly, though, it’s to do with Beaulieu’s wonderfully deadpan yet impassioned performance. She’s especially good at slipping the audience lugubriously perplexed, Oliver Hardy-esque sidelong glances when faced with the awareness that she has just put her foot in it again. For Beaulieu makes it clear from the beginning that, as an investigative documentarian, she’s pretty much out of her depth.
Structurally, J’aime Hydro reminded me of another show that played at La Licorne this year, Les Événements. That play involved a mass-shooting survivor meeting a multitude of affected and interested parties, all played by the same actor, until a climactic and charged face-toface meeting with the killer himself. In J’aime Hydro, Beaulieu meets activists, family members and acting colleagues — including Roy Dupuis in his role as spokesperson for the environmentalist group Fondation Rivières — until finally reaching the heart of the matter in a riveting sit-down with a Hydro-Québec VP. All these other parts are superbly and often hilariously played by Mathieu Gosselin, with sound designer Mathieu Doyon acting as a kind of chorus while he twiddles the knobs.
A familiar face in Québécois stage, film and television, Beaulieu previously portrayed Porte Parole’s artistic director Annabel Soutar in The Watershed, after which Soutar approached her to create this documentary piece, under Philippe Cyr’s direction. It premièred in June as part of the Festival TransAmériques. (A followup will play at Usine C next year.)
We see Beaulieu protesting to Soutar (whom Gosselin cheekily sends up as a driven, rather intimidating bossy-boots) not only about her own ignorance on the subject, but about her aversion to conflict. That, however, as Soutar explains, is precisely the point. So rather than being a fully briefed, confrontational supersleuth, Beaulieu comes across as a relatable Everywoman thrust into awkward meetings with activists and experts, nervously posing questions before public meetings.
The main purpose of the show is to take us step by step through the issues. After a rather patronizing reprimand from Farès Khoury, Porte Parole’s co-founder, that she should go educate herself, Beaulieu goes all the way back to the basics of electricity production, Edison and Tesla’s “war of the currents,” and the difference between AC and DC. And no, the show isn’t above suddenly crashing in with riffs from AC/ DC, and is all the more fun for it.
As the title suggests, J’aime Hydro is also a kind of love story. Hydro-Québec represented a massive step forward in the province’s self-confidence and selfsufficiency, and Beaulieu introduces a very moving clip of René Lévesque unveiling his plans for the company. For the many reasons outlined in this show, the dream might have soured, but as Beaulieu points out, once you’ve been in love you can never be indifferent afterwards.