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Village voice

Playwright and novelist Michel Tremblay has always cut to the core of Quebec identity

by AMY BARRATT

Unfortunately, Michel Tremblay was not available for interview for this piece due to treatments for a cancer of the throat that was diagnosed last spring. We wish him a swift and full recovery.

When Michel Tremblay appeared on our cover in 1989 (interviewed by Ken Morrison), he was already a successful playwright and novelist whose place in the literary canon, not just of Quebec or Canada, but of the world, was already assured.

He was then two decades into an illustrious career that began with Les Belles Soeurs, first produced at Théâtre du Rideau Vert in 1968. Over the years, Tremblay has remained as prolific as ever, with works including plays, novels, memoirs and even the libretto for an opera, Nélligan.

At first, his fame looked more like notoriety. It’s almost impossible to understand today—when genuine québécois accents are heard every day on stage and on screen—the uproar that surrounded Les Belles Soeurs at the time. Tremblay was accused of debasing the French language and setting the québécois people back. What we see now, of course, is that he simply made his characters speak the way they did when he was growing up on la rue Fabre. He took the colourful turns of phrase and eccentric pronunciations and made them into poetry.

Tremblay has always followed the basic literary dictum to “write about what you know.” He still lives not too far from where he grew up in the Plateau, and in his work he still frequently revisits characters based on his extended family. He has been called a québécois Marcel Proust, employing his own remembrance of things past to create a timeless portrait of a city: Montreal.

Over the years, of course, the things Tremblay knows about have expanded, so that these days the characters in his plays and his fiction can just as easily be middle-aged Outremont lesbians or internationally-renowned opera singers as 1950s housewives. In some of his best work, portraits of his working class extended family comfortably share space with musings about the role of the artist. In Encore une fois, si vous permettez, he created an homage to his Saskatchewan-raised mother Rhéauna (Nana) that gave us a glimpse into the genesis of the writer and man of the theatre.

Encore une fois… was created at Théâtre du Rideau Vert exactly 30 years after Les Belles Soeurs, in August 1998. The English version, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, was created several weeks later at the Centaur Theatre.

Next, Tremblay gave us L’État des lieux, which was both a portrait of an opera singer unwilling to accept that her talent and her career are in decline, and a very political, intellectual discussion of québécois identity. Then came two plays with titles inspired by French verb tenses: Le Passé antérieur, which focused on the young adulthood of Albertine, a character based on Tremblay’s aunt; and L’Impératif present, which revisited the father and son from 1987’s Le Vrai Monde? He wrote the screenplay of the hugely popular film, C’t’à ton tour, Laura Cadieux, and its sequel, as well as a téléroman, Le Coeur découvert, based on his novel of the same name, which aired on Radio-Canada in 2003.

The current theatre season will see the première of Bonbons Assortis, a play based on one of his recent memoirs, as well as revivals of Hosanna (TNM) and Encore une fois... (Quebec City’s Théâtre les gens d’en bas brings its production to Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui).