Play reveals Trudeau's private side

At one point in the engaging Trudeau Stories, staged at the Arden Theatre on Wednesday, actor Brooke Johnson cries out “Whee-e-e” in childlike delight.

She describes a wintry evening walk with Pierre Elliot Trudeau, he wearing a beaver hat and she in a red ski jacket, sliding on an icy sidewalk on their way to a bar.

“We skated for a block in our boots,” she says adding they were followed by a security detail creeping along in a black car a discreet half a block behind them.

Using old journals and letters, Johnson weaves a solo monologue that provides private insights into a larger than life man. And while there might be a hint of voyeurism about using private moments for public consumption, she presents this 70-minute memoir through the gentle eyes of both friend and artist.

They became friends in 1985, about 18 months after he had left politics and returned to private life in Montreal. No longer twirling pirouettes behind the Queen, Trudeau now was just an ordinary citizen walking to work and arranging four cereal bowls at breakfast for himself and his three sons.

The occasion of Johnson and Trudeau’s meeting was a gala charity ball for the National Theatre School where she was a student. At the time she was 23 and he was 65, but their odd-couple relationship lasted about a decade.

Johnson insists the relationship was never sexual, but was grounded in a love of the outdoors, poetry, architecture, theatre, politics and life itself. They travelled to his lake home, paddled in the rain, hiked, swam, enjoyed a sauna and set bear traps together. On occasion they dined at bistros and restaurants — once on peanut butter and toast — and drank cognac in the late hours at his elegant home.

At his art deco home, the four-storey Cormier House, she describes the four sets of shoes in the foyer, a 30-foot-high atrium and a Ming vase given to Trudeau by Mao Tse Tung that was cherished as much as the photographs of his boys on the piano.

Johnson’s energetic descriptions are by and large loaded with charm, humour and poignancy. In particular, she nails the timbre of his voice, that languid nasal quality so instantly recognizable, and the offhand shrug of his shoulders. Completing the picture were scenes displaying his intellect, ironic wit, an inborn courteousness and a rabid curiosity.

Fortunately her treatment is not strictly hero worship and reveals some of his vulnerabilities. Johnson shows us his loneliness, his moodiness and how he’d shut people out during those times. And at one point, although Trudeau was revered as a great intellect, he admitted reading more legal papers and bills than books.

By peeling back the layers of Trudeau, Johnson also reveals clues about herself and why the former prime minister sought her company. She’s smart and funny with a definite quirkiness that he obviously found appealing.

Solidly crafted, Trudeau Stories is filled with joie de vivre and a passion for life laced with moments of angst – both his and hers. Yet you leave the theatre realizing that although the enigmatic prime minister had a savoir-faire equal to other world leaders, the private Trudeau prized the same values as the people he served — family, friendship, loyalty and a never-ending quest to learn more.