JONATHAN RITTENHOUSE
Eleven articles of varying length and distinction, a conventional introduction by one of the editors, Jonathan Weiss, a useful "Works Cited" section and a comprehensive index comprise the Michigan State University Press 1995 publication, Essays on Modern Quebec Theater. To their credit, editors Weiss and Donahue have been successful in securing contributions from major researchers on this subject from North America and France. As is always the case in such a collection of essays there is a mixture of the serviceable and the engaging, though this reviewer found himself "fast reading" on only a few occasions.
This American-published collection is useful as it provides extended essays in English by such accomplished scholars as Alonzo LeBlanc, Chantal Hébert, Lucie Robert, Gilbert David, among others—scholars who publish in their own language in their own country, but whose serious reflections on Quebec theatre in this English-language volume should benefit both an academic and a student readership not completely secure in its ability to fully comprehend academic French. Further, this collection of essays struck this reviewer as being most compelling when the essays focussed on and treated the socio-cultural complexity of Quebec theatre rather than specific texts. All in all, the volume should encourage its English-language readers to think beyond some of the stereotypes of Quebec culture and to consider, for example, the issue(s) of language(s) in Quebec as something more complicated, say, than a simple English-French axis.
American contributors—Jane Moss, Joseph Donahue Jr. and Ruth B. Antosh—provide close studies of specific works: respectively, recent feminist plays about birthing and mothering, Marcel Dubé's 1953 play Zone and those plays of Michel Tremblay in which the hermaphrodite figure is prominent. The latter analysis argues persuasively that such hermaphroditic characters as Hosanna, La duchesse and Manon can be seen as reflecting not only gay concerns and/or Quebec's political identity but also the myriad complexities and non-closure of Quebec's evolving cultural identity.
Two Canadian scholars, Jane Koustas and Elaine Nardocchio, write about audience and critical response, specifically Toronto's reactions to Quebec plays produced in English (Koustas) or French (Nardocchio). In particular, Nardocchio asks her readers (and future writers of Quebec culture) to keep in mind that "the study of response to Quebec should integrate, or at least regroup, the many contextual and psychological elements that can affect reception" (185).
Those essayists in this volume who do just that and who also consider how such elements affect production include Gilles Girard. In his essay he concentrates on metatheatrical experimentation in the most recent Quebec productions and how the spectator of such works becomes complicit with the creative process and, often, adds his/her participation to that of the players. Guy Teissier, in his contribution, specifically focuses on plays of the 1980s, presenting theatre at a "pronounced level of supertheatricality" (169) which, for Teissier, reveals not only the reflective nature of that post-referendum decade but also playwrights' concerns about the artist's role in society.
In a more historically-based survey of Quebec theatre, Chantal Hébert, in her insightful article, also finds much to praise and uncover about the plays and productions of the first post-referendum period. In such works "the search for identity passes into the very act of writing, of recounting one's self: the creative act thereby becoming political in the larger sense" (41) and "a continual provocation [is produced] that incites the audience to assume its function as first receiver-interpreter of the theatrical act" (43).
Lucie Robert takes an equally historical approach in her essay on the language of theatre in Quebec where she begins by asserting that in Quebec history "theater has been a speech act" (112) and, very often, preoccupied with language itself. Her tracing out the languages of Quebec from their historical roots through their popular joual and beyond-joual variations is very useful. Indeed, her discussion of joual as either a language used for translation or for creation argues that joual can be perceived as a literary style where it is "a form deriving its originality from the exigencies of a written language" (118), where its theatrical use was primarily to shock via its "massacre of good taste" (121) and where, finally, joual speaks on stage not just by or for the working class but "is the speech of the whole Quebec people" (123).
In an even more oracular and overarching essay, Alonzo LeBlanc provides a socio-cultural context for recent Quebec theatre, noting its sense of American adventure, its Dionysiac tendencies and its parodic encounters with works from other cultures. LeBlanc emphasizes the notion of the "cross-fertilization of cultures" throughout his essay and concludes his essay with an epiphanic vision of Quebec theatre wherein self and other cross-fertilize via love, "a mingling based on closeness, encounter, and compromise, and where the partners, A and B, meet each other half way, in the middle, yet remain dis- tinguishable to varying degrees, as in the staging of a written text" (24).
Gilbert David takes on a somewhat more problematic and materially-based assessment of Quebec's postmodern theatre. On one hand he views Quebec's theatrical milieu as "eminently tribal, the last vestige of a socio-cultural tradition at one and the same time ultra-nationalist, overly sensitive and conservative, if not frankly anti-intellectual" (140). Moreover, the powerful position of television within Quebec culture, particularly, is so pervasive for David that the medium "offers itself, by subjecting all reality to the norms of the société du spectacle (Guy Debord), like an immense but soulless cabaret" (142).
Of all the offerings in this collection, the essay which most intrigued me was Annie Brisset's thought-provoking "Language and Collective Identity: When Translators of Theater Address the Québécois Nation." Observing that Quebec theatre over the past thirty years has almost completely eliminated its previously moderate dependence on producing texts of French origin and, even more significantly, its near total dependence on translations imported from France, Brisset offers an interesting analysis of this cultural phenomenon. As she views it, with Quebec translations "the other is not translated; rather one translates oneself into the other by a mirror-like identification, by imposing only those symbolic representations of the foreign text that belong to the constructions of the collective identity [the Québécois nation] in the discourse of the target society" (73). Moving from Lacan to a Foucault-style cautionary conclusion, she avers that with contemporary Quebec theatre "the rapport between language and identity is a power relation that reproduces, within the theatrical institution, the frameworks of legitimization and delegitimization that a new 'québécois' elite is installing in society" (77).
As a collection of essays devoted to modern Quebec theatre, this publication has the significant merit of providing a variety of perspectives on Quebec's contemporary theatre practice. In my opinion the publication would have been even more successful if it had a further-ranging and more challenging "Introduction" (perhaps from one of the scholars of Quebec theatre conspicuously absent from the volume: Jean-Marc Larrue, Hélène Beauchamp, Jean-Cléo Godin or L.E. Doucette?). Further, I would have included more essays using Cultural Studies methods in order to provide more contextually-provocative analyses of other contemporary media and cultural expressions, and, finally, I would have been more than happy if the volume had provided somewhat less than total erasure of English-language culture in Quebec.