Interview with Playwright Michel Tremblay

Conducted by Luc Boulanger

His world is the Plateau Mont-Royal of the 1960s, a Montréal neighbourhood inhabited by the rejects of Québec society: women alone in their kitchens dreaming of freedom; drag queens hanging around on street corners waiting for their Prince Charming; eternal children adrift in a world of grownups...A very local world, admittedly, but one that fascinates audiences the world over.

More of Michel tremblay's work is performed around the world than that of any other Québec playwright - his plays have been staged in eighteen countries, including the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Finland, Australia, Italy, Holland, Sweden, Brazil and Zaire. Most of his plays and three of his novels are available in English. Les Belles-soeurs, the play that launched his career in 1968, has been translated into ten languages, including Yiddish and Scots.

How does he explain his success? "It's not the subject matter that gives a play universal appeal, but rather the quality of the writing," says Michel Tremblay. "If a piece is good, it speaks to everyone; if it's bad, it's forgotten."

"All writers talk about themselves, those around them and what they know. The rest is just a matter of transposing your own experience into different settings. Few of us have anything in common with the characters in Proust, Dostoevsky and Chekhov's work, but they still strike a chord in us all. You don't need to be an aristocrat or a Carmelite nun to understand the Duchesse de Langeais's distress when she retreated to a convent in Balzac's novel."

Michel Tremblay is "one of the family" in Québec where his work touches something in everyone. Québeckers love the characters that people Tremblay's world. In the lives of Carmen, Hosanna and Albertine, they recognize both the grandeur and the misery of their own hopes and fears.

When he travels abroad to attend productions of his plays, Tremblay finds the same warm welcome. "Whether you're in Finland or the United States, people all laugh and cry at the same scenes. Different directors may change the emphasis a bit or bring out different aspects, of course, but a good line is still a good line."

"The most gratifying thing for a living author is to have his work produced abroad. At last year's book fair, the Salon du livre, in Montréal, people asked me about the recent Tokyo production of Albertine in Five Times. They wanted to know whether the audience understood it. "Isn't that odd," I said, "When you see a Chekhov or a Mishima play, I'll bet you understand everything, don't you?"

When we spoke with him in January, Michel Tremblay had just finished his twenty-seventh play and was starting on a new novel. At 52, he still delights in telling stories from his "Neighbourhood", and reaching out to people around the globe.