Michel Tremblay: Plays in Scots: Volume 1

Description

“The greatest playwright Scotland never had.” – Mark Fisher, The Guardian

Michel Tremblay is considered the most important playwright in Quebec theatre history. His ground-breaking work for theatre presents Montreal’s working class speaking the city’s vernacular French. Tremblay’s plays and novels create a family saga where many characters appear in more than one work.

Bill Findlay, a Scot, and Martin Bowman, a Montrealer of Scottish descent, translated eight Tremblay plays into Scots. The energy, versatility, and range of the Scots language capture the essence of Tremblay’s drama. These critically acclaimed translations, produced professionally in Scotland from 1989 to 2003, constitute an important body of work in modern Scottish theatre.

This volume’s four translations premiered at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, during Michael Boyd’s tenure as artistic director. They include three of Tremblay’s early masterpieces: The Guid Sisters, Hosanna, and Forever Yours, Marie-Lou. The fourth play, The Real Wurld?, shares Tremblay’s devastating critique of family life. These plays confront topics such as domestic and sexual abuse. These are strong plays, as relevant today as when first produced.

Besides playtexts, both volumes of Michel Tremblay: Plays in Scots contain a foreword and introductions to each volume as well as to each play, including historical background material.