The year 1965 was particularly special for playwright/author Michel Tremblay as he finished his first major play, the groundbreaking, audacious Les Belles-Soeurs – a work that revolutionized both Québécois and Canadian drama, showcasing the Belle Province around the world.
Premiering Aug. 28, 1968 at Théâtre du Rideau Vert, the culture-shifting production brought together 15 working-class women aged 20 to 93, from downtown Montreal in one home to raucously vent their frustration with their lives in rude anger and, in a truly revolutionary move, all of it shouted and screamed to fellow Québécois in joual, the working-class jargon.
Staged in Stratford for the first time in 1991, Tremblay’s biting masterpiece, translated by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco, is now boldly reverberating throughout the Stratford Festival theatre with a diverse and very strong cast lead by Lucy Peacock, as Germaine Lauzon and Seana McKenna in the role of Rose Ouimet.
While still a comedy, replete with dark overtones that shocked the theatrical world 55 years ago, the focus remains on the women who gather in an east Montreal home to help a lucky Germaine paste a million Gold Star stamps she’s won into booklets so she can refurnish her modest dwelling.
At least, that’s what they assume the activity will be and certainly not a wild evening that will shake their worlds to the very core with unexpected revelations about family, friends, their gender, and humanity in general.
Director Esther Jun oversees the rapidly disintegrating social get-together with rapidity, panache, and keen observational skills for revealing and showcasing seething fury that bubbles to the surface with unthinkable theft of personal possessions in the blink of an enraged eye.
“It’s an honour not to be taken lightly,” she says. “It actually changed the world. We talk about plays, obviously having meaning and resonance for us today in society, but...(Les Belle-Soeurs) changed Quebec society.”
What she describes rather appropriately as a “kitchen-sink drama” turns into a magnificent revelation of true feelings, desires, and dreams, brought to shrieking, boisterous life in a host of marvellous performances.
Ironically 1965 was the midway point of the so-called Quiet Revolution – a term apparently first used by an anonymous Globe and Mail writer – a movement calling for Francophones to take leadership roles.
It produced huge political, socio-economical, societal, and cultural changes throughout Québec. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who abandoned the New Democratic Party for what he saw as the more electable Liberals, was elected into the House of Commons, and became Lester Pearson’s parliamentary secretary.
The province created the Caisse to manage funds contributed to the public pension plan. Even more importantly to the average Quebecker the beloved Les Habs (the Montreal Canadiens) took home the Stanley Cup, beating the Chicago Black Hawks on ice four games to three.
Meanwhile Germaine, giddy with delight that her Gold Star stamp party is about to get underway, greets her first guest, a neighbour Marie-Ange Brouillette (Shannon Taylor). After the customary perfunctory well-wishes at the door the host, flaunting her good fortune, leaves momentarily.
Taylor, in delightfully nasty fashion, launches into the first of many personal assaults to come against her host. She unleashes a volley of attacks on Germaine’s character including, her penchant for bragging … essentially citing every reason in the book for her to hate the stamp winner with unbridled passion.
As the evening moves along it quickly disintegrates into personal attacks against – not just the suddenly shocked hostess – but also directly at one and another. One rather preachy woman Rhéauna Bibeau, played with grand piety and sanctimony by Jamillah Ross, turns on her best friend as others look on in shock – feigned or otherwise.
Ijeoma Emesowum as Germaine’s daughter Linda Lauzon has numerous glorious moments battling with her mom and, while she may appear to love her swinging 60s lifestyle, she has her own personal demons to deal with outside her immediate family.
Pierrette Guérin (played with vigour and honesty by Allison Edwards-Crewe), Germaine’s unwelcomed younger sister, makes an unexpected visit, only to be ostracized by the others for her 10-year association with a local nightclub.
Akosua Amo-Adem delivers a powerfully effective performance as Angéline Sauvé when the same en-masse spurning is sanctimoniously bestowed on her as the others discover she has begun frequenting the same nightclub.
One of the most difficult relationships to watch, irrespective of what year we’re in, focuses on Thérèse Dubuc’s merciless attacks on her wheelchair bound helpless mother-in-law Olivine Dubuc.
Whether it’s an all-too frequent slap across the back of her head or violently dislodging her from her mode of transport, the punishment is brutal and certainly not worthy of laughter yet that was the response on numerous occasions – a sad statement on our respective societies then and now.
Nonetheless, Irene Poole is a thoroughly believable perpetrator of such wicked discipline and Diana LeBlanc as the victim holds her own, even managing to drag herself up from her chair for a little song and dance with two other guests. Shall we pause to rethink what is truly funny?
The list of superb performances is virtually endless but one must award a championship belt of some sort to Seana McKenna as Lucy’s feisty and relentlessly nasty sister Rose. The range of insults, complaints and pure hate knows no bounds and she delivers it with such intensity, it’s astonishing to behold.
Then again after ditching her normally drab wardrobe, Germaine does appear in a fancy dress adorned with a golden sash bearing the boastful title 'Winner'. All for what is little more than a self-congratulatory event in her own home, with her the only beneficiary.
So perhaps she does deserve just a tad of the fury directed at her for her rapidly inflating avarice coupled with her irritating tendency to self importance. However, with the theft of her valued stamps seemingly the main goal of her guests, greed and hubris seems more than appropriate for all her invitees.
Yet one is always aware that, beneath the surface of outrage and comical jumping on the dinner table to recite endless names or answer questions in hilarious unity, there are serious subjects being addressed by the author, director and cast.
It may be the Quiet Revolution – contrary to the volume level of these rowdies – but the effects have yet to reach these tragically trapped and disempowered women with legitimate and yet-to-be answered questions about life, their roles and unfulfilled desires and goals that have been brushed aside by societal circumstances and traditions that still remain seemingly set in concrete.
There are those magic moments highlighting those uncontrollable but all-together reasonable wishes for an escape from unfulfilling tedium “watching TV every night,” praying on their knees to a recorded ministerial message only to rattle off, then chuckle about, a rather tasteless joke about a nun being raped in an alley.
Serious issues of the era like abortion and elder abuse are broached. The text also addresses a potential light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for women struggling to join the Quiet Revolution, even freeing themselves at least for an evening out at those much frowned upon nightclubs.
They are clearly restrained by the ever-tightening bonds of family life and a strict adherence to traditional restrictive socio-religious morality still very much in place.
Judging from the joyous opening night standing ovation, those concerns should and will appeal to both young and older women seeking to escape either a self-imposed or socially dictated quietness more befitting their gender.
Throughout the work there are those brilliant moments of humour including a dubious ode to the euphoric pleasures of bingo and that oft-time repeated moan of reality from many of the women glaring at their host and to the audience’s delight: “Do I look like someone who’s ever won anything?”
Hats off to set designer Joanna Yu, costume designer Michelle Bohn, lighting designer Louise Guinand, composer/sound designer Maddie Bautisa and movement director Alyssa Martin. For those unsure about the title, Les Belles-Soeurs is French for sister-in-law, often translated to beautiful sisters.
Les Belles-Soeurs runs until Oct. 28 at the Festival Theatre.
