Les Belles Soeurs

Translated by: John Van Burek, Bill Glassco

Germaine Lauzon has won a million trading stamps from a department store. Her head swimming with dreams of refurbishing and redecorating her working-class home from top to bottom with catalogue selections ranging from new kitchen appliances to “real Chinese paintings on velvet,” she invites fourteen of her friends and relatives in the neighbourhood over to help her paste the stamps into booklets.

Raucous, reckless and rude, the women shamelessly share their most secret hopes and fears, complain stridently about their friends and relatives, fantasize wistfully about escaping the misogynist drudgery of their lives and surreptitiously tuck most of the stamps into their purses and clothing, self-righteously appropriating what they consider to be Germaine’s “illegitimate” good fortune.

While earlier attempts had been made to stage the realities of Québécois life using colloquial language and a realist backdrop of working-class Montréal, these populist hits were considered rustic and anomalous, while “real” (Parisian) French continued to dominate theatre and “high culture” until the end of the 1950s.

As Québec searched for a new socio-political identity and a language that could articulate its rapidly emerging post-colonial reality throughout the “quiet revolution,” Michel Tremblay struggled to find an authentic Québécois voice. Written in 1965, it took three years for him get a first production of Les Belles Soeurs in 1968. Premiering at the Théâtre du Rideau-Vert in the same year that René Lévesque founded the nationalist Parti Québécois, this first of what was to become more than a dozen plays in Tremblay’s Cycle of Les Belles Soeurs became an overnight success. In one fell stroke, Joual, the distinctive Québec vernacular that had evolved over centuries since the end of French colonial rule had been legitimized, and Michel Tremblay, much like Chaucer in English and Dante in Italian, had become “the father of the Québécois language.”

AUTHOR

John Van Burek

Born in Toronto, John Van Burek studied at St. Anselm College in the United States, at the University of New Brunswick, and at the University of Toronto. He has been a practising theatre artist for over twenty years, in both French and English, throughout Canada. He has also worked in the fields of opera, film and television. In 1971, he founded the Théâtre français de Toronto where, over the years, he directed some sixty productions. He stepped down as Artistic Director of the company in 1991. Mr. Van Burek has taught at Ryerson Theatre School, York University and at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. He is also one of Canada’s leading translators for theatre, most notably of Michel Tremblay’s plays, including Les Belles-Soeurs (Talonbooks). Mr. Van Burek has received several awards and citations for his work, including the Toronto Drama Bench Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Canadian Theatre. In 1992, he was awarded a Canada Council “A” Grant for senior artists. This prestigious award allowed him to spend a year abroad, studying and working with major theatre artists in Nottingham, London and Paris. In addition, thanks to a special grant form the Minister of External Affairs and the Toronto Arts Council, he was able to undertake a program for the promotion of Canadian plays in both England and France.

AUTHOR

Bill Glassco

Born in Quebec, William Grant (“Bill”) Glassco was a Canadian theatre director, producer and founder of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. From 1959 to 1964, Glassco taught English at the University of Toronto. He lived in New York City from 1967 to 1969, where he studied acting and directing. Glassco returned to Canada in 1969. He founded the Tarragon Theatre in 1970 with his wife Jane (née Gordon), and stayed there until 1982. Later, he became the artistic director of the CentreStage Theatre Company which merged, in 1988, with the Toronto Free Theatre to become CanStage. In 1982, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.