A View of The Madonna Painter

Reviewed by Beverly Akerman


The village of Sainte-Coeur de Marie, Lac Saint-Jean Québec, Fall 1918. A beautiful young priest arrives, bringing with him rumours of a devastating plague: English Canadian soldiers, returning from Europe in anticipation of an Armistice, are believed to be spreading the Spanish flu as they search the countryside for French Canadian deserters.

The young priest has faith that the epidemic can be averted by an offering to God: a triptych depicting the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, her sacred heart circled by a glorious crown and pierced by a sword, with a few drops of her blood glistening “like scarlet pearls.” The local doctor agrees to sponsor the grand fresco, to be created by an itinerant Italian painter named Alessandro. To ensure his work’s originality, the painter insists on using local girls as models, and four young village women—all named Mary—vie for the honour: Mary Anne, particularly naïve and suggestible, Mary Frances, a more worldly adventuress, Mary Louise who ‘reads’ people through the creases left in their bed linens, and Mary of the Secrets, who eases the dying to their peace by swallowing their sins and regurgitating them in a nearby field where nothing can grow.

In a time when the dearth of young men results in young women “exhausted from fits of longing,” when the Church torments the faithful with its notions of piety, purity, and sin and when the doctor mortifies their flesh, acting as more of a butcher than a healer, Michel Marc Bouchard’s award-winning play drives a stake through the heart of ancient superstitions and myths and poses a few sharp questions of its own. Does sacrifice deepen faith? Does the greatest glory arise from the most intense suffering? What is God’s failure? Is art a force for exaltation or corruption? What—and where—is the soul?

In his introductory note, Michel Marc Bouchard, ably assisted by Linda Gaboriau’s translation, warns us that his play “is writ in scarlet pigments, in holy wine and haemoglobin, all the shades of red that flow through us, from our sex to our souls. It is a collision of ecstasies, a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.”

With a climax as wrenching as any of the classic tragedies, The Madonna Painter was awarded Italy’s Primo Arte Candoni for best new foreign-language play presented in 2002 and was shortlisted for the 2004 Masque for best play of the year by l’Académie québécoise du theatre. In addition to its French and English versions, the play has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Greek editions.

Loosely inspired by events surrounding the creation of the fresco that still adorns the nave of the church in Michel Marc Bouchard’s birthplace of Sainte-Coeur de Marie, The Madonna Painter is an unforgettable blend of love and death, an alchemy of pigment, blood, and other bodily secretions.