Preview
THIS IS TREMBLAY!
Michel Tremblay and Friends
WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Sunday, October 17
Margaret Greenham Theatre
(The Banff Centre)
Until Robert Lepage achieved international renown in the 1990s, unarguably the most famous name in contemporary Quebec theatre was Michel Tremblay.
In 1968, when he was only 26, the Montreal playwright kick-started a new era in French-Canadian drama with his classic play Les Belles-Soeurs, which was radical in both content (a raucous, candid look at the lives of working-class Quebec women) and form (it was written in vulgar joual at a time when Quebec writers were still using formal Parisian French). In his many subsequent plays and novels – Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, Bonjour, là, Bonjour, Albertine, in Five Times, the Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal books – he has painted a fictional lower-middle-class Montreal that’s as vivid as Dickens’s London or Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg. And he is an icon of queer culture, creator of the great drag-queen hero/heroines the Duchess of Langeais and Hosanna (the latter role first played in English by Richard Monette, now the artistic director of the Stratford Festival).
This weekend, WordFest pays tribute to Tremblay with a special event at The Banff Centre given the exclamatory title This is Tremblay! and featuring the master playwright "and friends." The rest of the blurb in the WordFest brochure is equally vague: "A dramatic celebration of one of Canada’s most influential literary figures." So, what exactly will that entail?
"I think it’s an encounter with the public, and some actors will be reading excerpts from some of my plays," says Tremblay during an interview from his agent’s office in Montreal. "And Jean Grand-Maître (artistic director of Alberta Ballet and, indeed, a friend) will be interviewing me on the stage. It’s very casual and," he adds with a good-natured laugh, "I hope it will be nice."
Tremblay isn’t just revelling in his laurels, however. He also has a novel to promote – Some Night My Prince Will Come, the belated English translation of La nuit de princes charmants, which he wrote in 1995. "It’s one of the nicest things I’ve written in my life," he says. "I’m very proud of that book." Loosely inspired by Voltaire’s Candide, the novel is set in the Montreal of Tremblay’s youth.
"I wanted to write a book about a young gay man in Montreal in 1960, when it was not (easy) to be homosexual," he explains. "It’s the story of an 18-year-old man who decides to go out one night and try to lose his virginity. Like Candide, he has to leave his home and go through many adventures. We follow him through Montreal for one night in search of Prince Charming."
Although he has lived abroad and now spends half the year in Key West, Florida, Tremblay has never strayed far, in life or art, from his hometown and, particularly, the blue-collar section of East Montreal where he grew up as the precocious son of a linotype operator. Today he has a home on Rachel Street in the Plateau Mont-Royal, the setting for so much of his work and now, not atypically, gentrified and the city’s trendiest area. "It’s quite amazing what it has become," he says, adding, "I don’t know why I can’t leave that neighbourhood. It made me and I’m very happy there."
However, he does much of his writing now in Key West, where he has owned a home for the last nine years (spared, incidentally, by the recent spate of hurricanes off the south Atlantic). It’s become a haven from Canadian winters – "I just couldn’t stand winter anymore," he says. "It is beautiful… for half an hour. After that, you’ve had enough" – and a place where his friends come to party while he works. "I don’t know what it is to be on holidays there," he says. "I would like to try to be on holidays for a whole winter, but can I do it? I don’t know."
A professional writer all his life, Tremblay continues to produce plays and novels like clockwork. His last play, Impératif Présent, premièred last season at Montreal’s Théâtre de Quat'Sous and he’s just finished another to be staged next fall. His latest novel will be published in November and he says he might write another one this winter. Clearly, he’s a fast writer – but he says his works can take years to conceive.
"I write very quickly, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about (a work) for a long time," he says. "I can’t just sit and improvise when I write; I have to know everything that’s going to be in a play or in a book. I have to prepare. When I finally sit down, it takes me four or five months to write a novel because everything is ready to come out." The plays take less time, he adds. "Novels are not my first trade and they are, for me, more difficult and take longer to write. I can write a play in 11 days when it’s ready to be done."
The plays also get translated into English much faster. Tremblay’s last big stage hit, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (a warm-hearted tribute to his imaginative mother), made its French debut in August of 1998 and its English one only two months later, going on to win Toronto’s Chalmers and Dora Mavor Moore awards.
The man largely responsible for introducing Tremblay to English-speaking audiences was the late Bill Glassco, founder of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, who, along with John Van Burek, translated his plays and gave them their first English-Canadian productions. Tremblay says he was in Paris last month when he learned that Glassco had died. "He was such a wonderful, a great man," he says. "He was one of the first to be interested in what I was writing. When he left Tarragon we lost touch, but in the ’70s and ’80s he was a very important man in my life."
In more recent times, Linda Gaboriau has become Tremblay’s regular English translator, but others have come up with some interesting adaptations of his work. Perhaps the most successful is The Guid Sisters, a version of Les Belles-Soeurs rendered in Scots dialect for Glasgow’s Tron Theatre that proved a box-office smash and helped make Tremblay one of Scotland’s most popular playwrights. Indeed, since the ’90s the Scots have probably seen more of Tremblay’s work – and Lepage’s, for that matter – than western Canadians.
The inevitable Lepage comparison brings up the question of why Tremblay hasn’t also found an outlet on film – especially given the vibrancy of Quebec cinema. But Tremblay’s experiences doing movies in the ’70s left him with a distaste for their inner workings.
"I stopped because I hated the fact that money is omnipresent in filmmaking," he says. "It’s the only art where you have to think about money from the first day you write your script. I regret it in a way, because I love movies, I really do." But, as a writer, he found it demoralizing. "Maybe it’s pride, but I think one of the least respected people on a movie set is the one who wrote the script, whereas in the theatre I am king."
And, certainly, while he has taken his share of critical drubbings from time to time, Tremblay remains a monarch among Canadian dramatists. Or, as he puts it, conjuring up an image of one of his flamboyant drag queens, "I’m still kicking high at 62 – or trying to." |
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