Translated Québec Theatre in the New Millennium: Established Authors and a Few New Trends

Abstract

In 1988, Québec theatre in translation became "awesome" (Conlogue qtd. in Koustas 1995, 98). "Toronto loves Québec," unironically exclaimed the title of a 2012 article in the Québec theatre magazine Jeu (Côté 2012, 49). In another aptly named article, "From 'Homespun' to 'Awesome:' Translated Quebec Theater in Toronto," Jane Koustas chronicles the evolving response to French-Canadian drama by the main target of its translations: English Canada. Critics attending the translation of Gratien Gélinas' Bousille et les justes at the Royal Alexandra in Toronto in 1962, for example, insisted on its "homespun" qualities, "emphasiz[ing] that which conformed to their vision of quaint, rural Quebec while dismissing the larger questions addressed by the play" (Koustas 1995, 86). Paired with indifference or hostility, this response subsisted through the emergence of what Michel Bélair (1973) called nouveau théâtre québécois, which engaged with the sociopolitical specificity of a rapidly modernizing Québec in the vernacular of Montreal's working class, joual. The dialect's mix of French and English, as well as the context embedded within it, caused issues for translators, who struggled to find an equivalent in English (Bosley 1988). The production of Michel Tremblay's Forever Yours, Marie-Lou at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1972 showed how the nouveau théâtre québécois, whose sociopolitical particularities were considered undigestible to critics, could be read as universal or "Canadian" (Koustas 1995, 93). Perhaps predictably then, critics adopted "a less defensive, more open attitude" (82) in the 1980s, when theatre artists in Québec started to craft work that was considered "more universal" (97) in scope, or more interested in constructing and deconstructing the possibilities of drama, theatre and performance, as well as in producing pieces that could travel internationally, as in the imagistic and multilingual travelling works of Robert Lepage or Gilles Maheu.