Trudeau Stories: Memoirs Of A Friendship.
Brooke Johnson Revisits Her Time Spent With Soulmate Pierre Trudeau
Canadian actor Brooke Johnson walks on stage slowly as the lights in the theatre dim to a mellow glow. She begins speaking in a calm conversational voice reading from the pages of a diary, one assumes, that she holds in her hands. After a few passages she traipses, across the stage and the light go to full black. She is sitting and continues to tell us her story, an extraordinary story of a young woman’s friendship with one of Canada’s most charismatic Prime Minster Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Meeting the Former Prime Minister
It began quite simply, according to her; she was in borrowed shoes that were too big for her and he, probably intrigued by her youthful awkwardness, wanted to dance with her. When they finally did, the tune was too fast for her toilet paper-stuffed shoes and she had to explain her difficulty with dancing to the song, he was understanding and waited for a slower one. After checking with her to see if the song he finally decided on was slow enough for her, he got his promised dance.
This first meeting took place at a National Theatre School fundraiser in Montreal in 1985; she was 23 and he was 65. Before leaving that night, Trudeau gave her his number and invited her to take a walk in the country with him at a convenient time. A few weeks later she called his office and left a message for him. It was a simple question, “Which country?”
Palling Around With Pierre
For the rest of the play Brooke re-introduces us to a man that many Canadians would think they know. She talks about his certainty while on the world stage, but with her he was always checking things, asking her if this was okay. He was very big on hearing her opinion. She managed to debunk another myth, that he was an avid reader. He told her he was not; after all of the bills and legal papers he waded through each day, time for reading was not there, but he would love to be, he assured her.
She recalled a time when she took him to a small bar in Lower Montreal where he was immediately surround by the students who frequented the place, while she was pushed to the edge of the throng. When she questioned him about the burly quiet men who were always in the background, Trudeau flippantly replied, “they gotta to be here, maybe next year they will only be one.”
As I listened to her I couldn’t help but wonder how a friendship like that could go unnoticed and unreported in these times. Canada is no America when it comes to gossip rags, but Trudeau, while being charismatic, was also one of Canada’s most controversial leaders, and in these times of twenty- four hour news cycles, this friendship surely would have attracted attention.
On Stage at Theatre Passe Muraille
On stage, Johnson used the spaces very effectively to tell her story, moving from the easy chair in one corner, sometimes sitting, dancing and whirling through the confines of the stage, taking our imagination back to a bit of Canada’s past and the innocence of her platonic youthful friendship with a Canadian icon. Time as she tells it eventually broke the friendship off.
His death in 2000 brought memories back and, as she states, “I wanted to clear my mind and write down what happened; to remember that time.”
Trudeau Stories, written by Brooke Johnson and directed by Allyson McMackon, is part of Theatre Passe Muraille's Festival of Four Plays 2008
Brooke Johnson
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