Quebec Voices: Three Plays

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Quebec Voices could well contribute to new developments in the English-Canadian theatre:
anyone having seen Chaurette’s Provincetown Playhouse, July 1919 or René Gingras’s Breaks, not to speak of René-Daniel Dubois’s Don’t Blame the Bedouins, will have difficulty sitting through the usually realistic plays of our anglophone world. Edited by Robert Wallace, this volume and its three plays open new penspectives.

Chaurette’s play is poetic theatre in which Charles 38 recreates Charles 19 in 19 scenes that re- and de-construct the summer during which he first attempted to stage the play, which led to his madness, to his lover’s death, to the death of his lover’s lover, and to the sacrifice of the black boychild.

Breaks brings three men of three generations to the stage but could be performed by one actor only. The action seems to take place, essentially, in the mind of one of the characters and it is mainly their handling of language which distinguishes them from one another. As Pete, the middle-aged one, says, “You put certain elements together and the combination can be dynamite.” He doesn’t know how to explain this, but of course that is not necessary either. The audience feels that Gingras has done exactly that.

So, by the way, has Robert Wallace, by putting into one volume these three plays by three male writers, all three on “men in transition,” all three showing men’s struggle with traditional assumptions and patriarchy. Women are absent from this theatre where men deal with their inabilities to show feeling for their own sex and to live in the world as it is. But it is safe to assume that without the Quebec women playwrights of the last 20 years, these plays could not have been written.

None of these plays accepts the linear order to which we have been used for such a long time. René-Daniel Dubois excels at creating the new disorder. He dis-organizes, dis-constructs American man as he dis-constructs his language, and hereby re-creates, re-spells his myth, his heritage, his being. Don’t Blame the Bedouins, a dream about what life seems to be and is not, was, this must be noted, first performed as a one-man show.

The translations are excellent, the notes and prefaces informative and to the point. It is to be hoped that these three plays will be performed frequently. But even reading them aloud, by oneself or with others, is refreshing and recreational.