Colloque

La littérature dramatique anglo-québécoise : le spectateur implicite du texte légiste

Gregory Reid

Membre a labase

Gregory Reid

Résumé du colloque

In his front-page review in Le Devoir of the Centaur Theatre performance of David Fennario’s The Death of René Lévesque, Robert Lévesque chastised the play’s audience, Les Anglais, BMW-driving Westmounters, for being “Marxists d’un soir.” In a subsequent review of the play and its aftermath in Jeu, Yvan Lamonde and Louise Vigeant asked the pointed question “À qui parle Fennario?” and concluded, “Il semble que Fennario ait eu quelque difficulté à identifier son récepeteur.” Nearly 20 years later the question and the problem remain, not just for David Fennario but for any playwright writing in English in Quebec. This presentation will provide analyses of the published versions of a selection of plays in English by Quebec playwrights in order to demonstrate how these publications through such features as their forms of direct address, representation or non-representation of conflict, and linguistic heterogeneity indicate a distinct, imagined, target audience. This evidence lends itself to, or at least brings forward for possible consideration, the conclusion that it is possible to identify in specific texts markers of an Anglo-Québécois literature.