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Theatre

Les Belles-Soeurs

Les Belles-sœurs

Michel Tremblay · 1968

Synopsis

A kitchen on the Plateau Mont-Royal, in Montreal. Germaine Lauzon has won a million trading stamps and gathers her sisters, sisters-in-law and neighbours to paste them into booklets. They settle around the table and talk about church, children, husbands, the contests they never win. Pierrette, the sister whom everyone avoids because she works in a club, arrives uninvited. One after another, each steps forward alone and says what she keeps from the others, while envy rises around the booklets.

Context

The author wrote this text in 1965 and waited three years for it to be staged: written entirely in joual, the popular language of Montreal, the play premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert on 28 August 1968, in a staging by André Brassard, and provoked heated debate. The text was published the same year by Holt, Rinehart et Winston. In 1972, Quebec refused to pay for the company's trip to Paris because of the joual; the play was performed there the following year, at the Espace Cardin.

Who it is for

A play of about a hundred pages in joual, made up of conversations and monologues; it is better heard than read.

Prizes and reception

Translated into some thirty languages; the English version by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco was staged in Toronto as early as 1973.

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