Les Belles Soeurs, Gateway Theatre, 6500 Gilbert Rd., Richmond, until Oct. 6. For tickets, go to gatewaytheatre.com/les-belles-soeurs.
Les Belles Soeurs was radical when it was first produced 50 years ago, questioning the core values of Quebecois Catholic society, and it’s still radical today, questioning our rampant consumer culture, the underlying basis of the economy of middle-class culture.
The iconic play by Michel Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco, when it was first produced in Quebec, shone a light into the kitchens of marginalized, working-class women, and on their lives filled with the drudgery of child-bearing, homemaking and poverty. It was the first time women from this class were the main characters in a major theatrical piece, and they are in their element, at home speaking “joual” – the language of working-class Quebecois women, filled with creative grammar and colourful cusses.
Tremblay said he wrote about 15 women because no one else would and these are the women of his youth in Montreal, explains Diane Brown, artistic director of Ruby Slippers Theatre which is producing the play at Gateway Theatre in Richmond. This play fits squarely into the mandate of the theatre production company that promotes women and diversity.
All the characters in Les Belles Soeurs are women and range in age from 20s to their 80s. In lead roles are two actors from the North Shore – Eileen Barrett who plays Des-Neiges Verrettes, and Patti Allan, a Capilano University graduate, who plays Rhéaunu Bibeau.
Les Belles Soeurs is set in the home of Germaine Lauzon, a working-class wife in east Montreal, who has just won a million golden stickers to the local department store. This will allow her to refurnish her home, so she has invited her friends and family to help her put the stickers into booklets so she can claim her prize. As the evening progresses, the conversation gets honest and the misery of this cast of marginalized characters is on display.
The women in Les Belles Soeurs, sisters, neighbours, friends, family, commiserate and discuss the problems they’re facing, but in the end, there is a betrayal as their envy of each other gets the better of them. There is no idealization of life in this play, it is raw and emotional, Brown explains. There is humour, but there is also self-loathing. The play’s themes of miserable women trying to find comfort in consumer culture is very relevant to today’s consumer culture and the “envy economy” of the 21st century.
The play includes a series of raw monologues where the women reveal their deep-seated unhappiness and how they’re oppressed and controlled by the Catholic society they live in. Brown points out the historical context of the play is 1965 during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, which was a time when women couldn’t have an abortion, didn’t have equal rights in law and couldn’t divorce because of the Catholic church.
“It was a really oppressive time for these working (class) poor women who, by the way, refused to speak English just because they felt so oppressed by the English elite and the Catholic church,” she says. A cultural revolution was taking place including the growing separatist movement that rebelled against English cultural dominance.
Tremblay is talking about the women he grew up with, the women no one else would write about, Brown explained, in all their “ugly glory” – their misery, their hypocrisy, their humour,
“The spectrum is wide and glorious, but it’s not idealized, there’s no idealization of the Quebecois Catholic family – if anything, it’s quite the opposite, it’s completely smashing the ideal of the French Canadian family and the Catholic church,” she says.
The play’s themes go beyond the social oppression of women in Quebec in the 1960s and into highly relevant topics of today. Brown calls the play a “searing indictment of our consumer capitalist culture.”
“The entire plot revolves around someone winning a bunch of stuff and the chaos that ensues and what that gives us is a portrait of the envy economy in action with people doing anything to raise their status within the tribe even if it means demeaning other people,” Brown said.
Tremblay talks about family as being so oppressed, they don’t have the ability for compassion – they’re hopeless and depressed, angry, and everyone is out for themselves.
The play also exposes the racism and misogyny of the culture, which Brown said are part of our culture today as well.
“These kind of ‘hate values’ as I call them, that are a product of a rudderless capitalism, are completely at play today and are being normalized in fact by people like Donald Trump,” she says. “The play has a particularly power punch to pack anywhere in Canada – it’s not Quebec specific any more, it’s bigger than that.”
Tremblay is known for giving voice to marginalized groups, like these women.
“When I see 15 women on stage telling me the truth, I get shivers down my spine,” Brown said. “When is the last time you went to a play and saw 15 women on the stage, fully realized, complex characters. It’s just so powerful. That alone to me makes it relevant theatre.”
The cast is also multi-generational and multicultural, Brown says, a reflection of Canadian culture in 2018. Les Belles Soeurs has also been translated into 30 different languages and is shown around the world, appealing to an international audience with its broad themes.
While the play was originally written in working-class Quebecois dialect, called “joual,” which is hard to translate, the English translation is done in short, choppy sentences, with direct speech and a lot of swearing, giving it that working class feel, Brown explains. But there is a strong rhythm to the language and to the whole play, she added, with choral work and choreography inspired by Quebecois step-dancing with shoe shuffles and stomps.
Ruby Slippers Theatre is the producer, Gateway Theatre is presenting the piece, for the first time in a professional theatre on the West Coast. The theatre company’s mandate is two-fold, first, to showcase women in strong roles, and female playwrights and directors, Brown explains; secondly, it seeks to promote cross-cultural diversity.
This is the first time ever Les Belles Soeurs will be staged in Western Canada in a professional theatre, Brown explained. It has only been staged at universities and colleges in the west, so this is the first time on a professional stage with professional actors.
The large cast makes it an expensive play to put on, but Brown also thinks there’s underlying sexism in Canadian theatre that has kept it from being staged here, adding that an all-woman show is considered a box-office risk.
“This is the premier production of (Les Belles Soeurs) on the West Coast which is kind of shocking,” Brown says. “It is one of the most famous and most popular plays in the entire Canadian canon.”
Les Belles Soeurs will run at Gateway Theatre, 6500 Gilbert Rd., Richmond, until Oct. 6. For tickets, go to gatewaytheatre.com/les-belles-soeurs.
