As Winnipeg theatre marks 100 years, Franco-Manitobans remember Pauline Boutal, Cercle Molière's 'grande dame'

Click here to read a version of this story in French. All interviews in this story have been translated from French.

As it celebrates its 100th anniversary, the legacy of one woman looms large over Théâtre Cercle Molière, Canada's oldest active theatre company.

Pauline Boutal, who joined the theatre company in Winnipeg's St. Boniface area in its early days and was its artistic director for more than 25 years, has been called the "grande dame" of the Cercle Molière.

"She's someone who left an indelible mark here, not only with the drawings that greet us every morning here at work, but her very soul inspired me so much as a woman of the theatre as well," said Geneviève Pelletier, the current artistic director of the theatre, referring to costume and set illustrations by Boutal that still adorn the walls of the theatre and its offices.

"There's no doubt that without her, Cercle Molière would have ceased to exist a long time ago," Marthe Benoist, a former actress with the theatre, said at the 1975 inauguration of an auditorium at the Franco-Manitoban Cultural Centre named in Boutal's honour.

Not that she would never have been caught bragging about it.

"She was modest. She never pushed herself forward," Monique Guyot, who performed at Cercle Molière for nearly 10 years, recalled in a 1997 interview with Boutal's biographer, Louise Duguay.

Yet "she was known across the country," said Guyot.

Pauline Boutal was born Pauline Le Goff in France in 1894.

She and her family came to Manitoba in 1907, where she met her future husband, Arthur Boutal, at the age of 15, when she worked as a typesetter at a newspaper owned by his print shop.

The two would go on to become a force in the early days of Cercle Molière.

"If the Cercle Molière is going to be able to mark its 100th anniversary … the primary fundamental circumstance is these two French immigrants who met, who became attached, who formed a couple, who shared a passion for theatre," said Bernard Bocquel, a former editor of the Franco-Manitoban newspaper La Liberté who has written several books on the history of francophones in Manitoba.

The birth of Cercle Molière

Pauline and Arthur married in 1916 in France, where he was serving during the First World War.

After the war, still living in St. Boniface — now part of Winnipeg, and the oldest French-speaking community in Western Canada — the Boutals found a vehicle for their shared passion in the French-speaking amateur theatre troupe Le Cercle Molière, founded on April 25, 1925. 

A year after its creation, the Boutals became members. 

"I'd always had a taste for theatre, but it was especially after I met my husband that it developed. Because he was crazy about theatre," Pauline said in an interview with Radio-Canada in the 1970s.

In 1928, Arthur became Cercle Molière's artistic director, a volunteer role he took on in addition to managing La Liberté.

Pauline was a talented artist who illustrated Eaton's catalogues while working for Brigdens of Winnipeg, a commercial art firm, and was called upon to design sets and costumes for Cercle Molière.

According to Duguay, who wrote the biography Pauline Boutal: An Artist's Destiny, they formed a true duo and became the heart of cultural life in St. Boniface.

"The Boutals enjoyed immense prestige," said Duguay.

That came during a challenging time for francophone culture in Manitoba. Under legislation passed in 1916, it was illegal to offer education in French in Manitoba schools — a rule that wasn't relaxed until 1967, coinciding with the end of the Boutal era at Cercle Molière.

But the Boutals, who were among the many French, Belgian and Swiss immigrants who swelled the ranks of Franco-Manitoban communities at the turn of the 20th century, were eager to share their French culture with their community, Duguay said.

With this in mind, in 1929 the Cercle Molière troupe set off on tour, performing in some 30 francophone centres across the province.

Part of the 100-year-old theatre's longevity can be explained by its founders' desire to build bridges between the French and the English communities, which were at the time separated by the Red River, says Dominique Laporte, an associate professor with the University of Manitoba's department of French, Spanish and Italian.

"The ability today for unilingual anglophones to follow a play [at Cercle Molière] with subtitles is the culmination of 100 years of desire to bring anglophones and francophones closer together," he said.

The Boutals' efforts were soon met with success, and the theatre company's influence spread beyond Manitoba's borders. In 1934, they took the troupe to the Dominion Drama Festival in Ottawa, where francophones and anglophones from all over the country rubbed shoulders.

"They made a good impression the first time, and then every time they attended," former La Liberté editor Bocquel said in an interview with Radio-Canada. 

"The Cercle Molière began to have a pan-Canadian influence."

The couple collaborated on a dozen productions between 1926 and 1941. In 1936, Arthur Boutal staged Les Sœurs Guédonnec (The Guédonnec Sisters), in which Pauline shared the stage with Gabrielle Roy, long before the now-acclaimed St. Boniface-born writer achieved success with her first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (published in English as The Tin Flute). The play won the company a second Dominion Drama Festival in 1936, and earned Pauline a best French actress award.

In  the late 1930s, Arthur received France's Palmes académiques françaises and the Canadian Drama Award in recognition of his contribution to the development of the dramatic arts in Canada — awards he asked to share with his wife. 

"She's my constant collaborator; she's also my go-to actress when I can't find what I want; and she's as dedicated as I am to a cause we hold dear: the promotion of beautiful French-language theatre," he is quoted as saying in Duguay's biography of Pauline.

Nurturing talent at 'La Péninsule'

The Boutal property, nicknamed "La Péninsule" by Gabrielle Roy, became the headquarters of the Franco-Manitoban cultural elite, according to biographer Duguay. A circle of close friends regularly discussed art and ideas there. 

"The house was really pretty, white with green shutters. There were peonies in front," said Duguay. "When Pauline Boutal talked about this place, it was really a little corner of paradise."

The house was demolished in the 1990s, though many members of the community, including Duguay, tried to save it, with hopes of turning it into an artists' residence.

In the eyes of the young Gabrielle Roy, the house embodied the effervescence of European culture in which she aspired to participate, says Sophie Marcotte, a professor of literature with Concordia University's department of French studies.

"She dreamed of being in the theatre, so Arthur and Pauline Boutal really represented a kind of ideal for Gabrielle Roy," said Marcotte.

The Boutals gave Roy the opportunity to put herself forward, but also the attention she needed to emancipate herself. It was in St. Boniface, in the couple's orbit, that Gabrielle Roy did her first writing.

"If there was anyone I wanted to resemble in my youth, it was you," Roy wrote to Pauline Boutal in June 1951. "I chose well, even if you don't want to concede the point."

In addition to nourishing Roy's thirst for culture and giving her the opportunity to develop her artistic talents, Pauline, through her choices and her lifestyle, gave her a glimpse into what women could be and accomplish when they allowed themselves to dream.

The show must go on

When Arthur died in 1941, Pauline hesitated, but "agreed to take up the torch" as artistic director of Cercle Molière, Bocquel said. 

For the rest of her life, she would see herself as the guardian of her husband's work, according to Bocquel.

When she was told that an auditorium at the Franco-Manitoban Cultural Centre in St. Boniface was to be named in her honour, she tried to argue it should be named after Arthur. 

It was actor and comedian Léo Rémillard who "made her understand that she was the one who made the mark," said Bocquel.

He said it was Boutal's mother and sister who convinced her to take on the job of leading the theatre company after Arthur's death.

"I accepted because I didn't feel alone," she said in April 1975, at the inauguration of the auditorium that is now named after her.

Her first production as director was in 1942, and she went on to direct nearly 30 plays, involving hundreds of members of the Franco-Manitoban community.

"The whole group trusted her. She had a way [with people]," actress Léonie Guyot said in a 1997 interview with biographer Duguay.

"Madame Boutal saw to everything: the set, the makeup, the costumes," she said.

Léo Rémillard, who was an actor under Pauline Boutal for over 20 years, recalls her as "very serious."

"She strived for perfection, and she would tell us so," he said. "You lift your little finger, it shows!" she would say. 

Boutal also placed the utmost importance on textual accuracy, he said. 

In performing plays by the famed 17th-century French playwright Molière (for whom the theatre is named), "sometimes my memory [failed me]," said Rémillard.

"She'd say, 'No, no, Léo. I don't want Rémillard. I want Molière.' So I understood," he said, laughing.

Rémillard and Boutal spent several months in Paris in the late 1940s, going to the theatre together every weekend. 

"We observed every detail," he said.

In an interview with Duguay in 1997, five years after Pauline Boutal died at the age of 97, Rémillard still remembered her rigour. 

As for his time in the Cercle troupe, he still has vivid memories of laughter and teasing between artists. And he isn't the only one. 

"We learned to have fun while being serious," said one of his fellow performers, Maxime Desaulniers. 

"[There was] always somewhere backstage, at rehearsals, at dress rehearsals, Madame Boutal calm, peaceful, firm, competent: 'Now now, kids: a little seriousness!'" he wrote in a 1975 book celebrating Cercle Molière's 50th anniversary.

"She knew how to find in her actors and actresses the spirit of the character and the spirit of the play. [She had] an understanding of humanity, and of enlightening situations between humans. We were amazed, and didn't really know why," said Roland Mahé, who took over as Cercle Molière's artistic director in 1968 after Boutal's retirement the year before.

"It just erupted out on stage. That's why she was strict in the rehearsal room."

Theatre by and for its community

Preparing a play for the Cercle Molière is no mean feat. In the early days, the troupe rehearsed five days a week, recalled Léo Rémillard.

"Madame Boutal never received a penny," he said. In the theatre's early days, "no one was paid. You had to love doing it."

Mahé recalls that when he was young, "going to the Cercle Molière was an event in every family."

The company would do one show a year at Pantages Theatre in downtown Winnipeg, he recalls (it didn't get its own theatre space in St. Boniface until 2010).

"We'd saved up our money. It was packed. The whole Francophonie was there," he said.

Boutal "was the only person who did that back then — the only person who gathered all those people, culturally speaking," said Mahé.

"The hundreds of people who attended the plays were nourished by this."

Her work reached francophones beyond Manitoba as well, when the theatre company toured Western Canada for the first time in 1958.

"We had the seats in the back of the bus removed so we could put our sets there," recalls Rémillard. "The actors and actresses, then the technicians, had taken time off from their jobs. Those were their holidays. It took 10 days."

Boutal's troupe toured several more times with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, some performances attracting several hundred people. The March 9, 1962, edition of Manitoba's La Liberté newspaper said Cercle Molière's fourth tour was intended to "bring live theatre and French theatre to French-Canadian centres that lack it."

"It was important for her to take her troupe to competitions, festivals … to really take to heart the notion that Manitoba could place itself on a national theatrical stage," said Geneviève Pelletier, who took over as artistic director from Mahé in 2012.

"I think she really put an important stamp on the birth of theatrical effervescence in Canada."

The radio theatre era 

Boutal's influence also extended to the airwaves of Radio-Canada. According to the U of M's Laporte, Cercle Molière is "a springboard to CKSB" – a St. Boniface community radio station in Boutal's day that became part of Radio-Canada in 1973.

Long before then, many Cercle Molière-trained actors had careers at CKSB and, later, at the public broadcaster, particularly as radio hosts.

"I wanted to do theatre, but you couldn't make a living from it. So one form of theatre was radio," said Rémillard, who became one of CKSB's first announcers in 1946 and had a decades-long career in broadcasting.

A true breeding ground for talent, Cercle Molière also contributed to the programming of what was the first French-language radio station outside Quebec. Members of the company took part in radio novels broadcast on CKSB from 1946 to 1953. 

"The importance of the Cercle Molière in those years is monumental," said Bocquel.

"Theatre is an art that is tasted, an art of the spoken word. When you want to save a community, make it survive, well, it has to speak. All of a sudden, French became a living, legitimate language again, one that could be heard on the airwaves."

Henri Bergeron, another Cercle Molière actor and one of the country's small-screen pioneers, hosted Radio-Canada's very first television program on Sept. 6, 1952. His years with Boutal, he would later say, would prove invaluable in helping him rise to a major challenge: learning, in front of the cameras, the profession of television host, which had never existed in Canada.

"It was precisely thanks to his theatrical training at Collège de Saint-Boniface and Cercle Molière that he was able to develop the fluency that has become legendary," said Laporte. 

Theatre 'was in her DNA'

Even a decade after she retired as artistic director in 1967, Boutal remained part of the theatre's artistic committee. 

"Le Cercle Molière was part of her being. It was in her DNA," said Mahé.

Her successor fondly recalls the calls he would receive from Pauline Boutal the day after opening nights. 

"I'm not much of a phone person, but it could last an hour," Mahé recalled. "She would analyze it. Then, sometimes she'd give me directions to take, and I'd change based on her comments. It was really comforting."

His own successor also feels Boutal's influence.

"I sometimes try to imagine what she would have done in certain circumstances, or if she'd been faced with a particular challenge," said current artistic director Pelletier.

Boutal remained passionate about acting well into her old age. In an interview with Duguay in 1997, Rémillard recalled the impromptu phone calls from his former director, when he was head of Radio-Canada's Winnipeg branch, a role he held until his retirement in 1983.

"Often, she'd call me when she'd seen a film, for example, in the evening, and then she'd do all the analysis. Sometimes I'd be busy, but I'd still listen to her. And then she'd make suggestions, and so on. She never missed a French movie," he recalls.

In addition to having contributed to the troupe's longevity, Pauline Boutal continues to inspire those who came after her. 

"To have a portrait of Pauline Boutal, you need a lot of sketches placed in a kind of kaleidoscope. Because there's a lot of depth, a lot of different levels," said Bocquel, who has long tried to understand her.

"She refused the fate generally reserved for women. On the contrary, she gave herself permission," said Concordia University's Marcotte. 

"She was a woman who was completely liberated," agrees Mahé. 

"There were no limits for her, really."

To find out more about Pauline Boutal's immigrant background, and her achievements as a visual and theatre artist, listen to the Radio-Canada podcast Pauline Boutal en 5 actes.