Yours Forever, Marie-Lou: Authenticity valued over history

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What's in a name? À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou – one of Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay's greatest works, the Long Day's Journey into Night of his oeuvre – had its English-language premiere at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre under the title of Forever Yours, Marie-Lou in 1972.

Since then, Tremblay's unremitting family drama about two sisters rehashing old arguments on the 10th anniversary of the death of their parents has been produced in English many times under that title, notably at the Stratford Festival in 1990. Forever Yours, Marie-Lou is easily as much an English-Canadian classic as it is a French-Canadian one. Now, however, Soulpepper is presenting this familiar play under an unfamiliar title in a new translation by Linda Gaboriau: Yours Forever, Marie Lou.

Forever Yours, Yours Forever. Such an inconsequential transposition of two words is hard not to see as a willful rebranding – and as a repudiation of the previous translation by Bill Glassco and John Van Burek and, more troublingly, the play's English-language performance history. Indeed, Diana Leblanc's production – cast with francophone actors performing in English – implicitly makes the argument that Tremblay does not belong to English-language performers, the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, in an authentic way.

This is an especially problematic position to take at a theatre company that has consistently shown that Hungarian plays and Russian plays and Norwegian plays can be English-Canadian plays, too. Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, like so many great plays, has a creation myth behind it. Tremblay wrote it over 11 days in New York's Chelsea Hotel, inspired by a Brahms quartet he had heard at Lincoln Center.

Yours Forever, Marie-Lou – I'll use the new title to discuss Soulpepper's production – is a quartet, too. Carmen (Suzanne Roberts Smith), a country-and-western singer on Montreal's Saint-Laurent Boulevard, visits her pious sister Manon (Geneviève Dufour) to implore her to stop wallowing in the tragedy of 10 years ago, when their parents and younger brother died in a car crash.

While the sisters argue about whether it is possible to move beyond their tragic past, we also watch Marie-Lou (Patricia Marceau) and Léopold (Christian Laurin) argue on the morning of their deaths – perhaps in the minds of their daughters, perhaps in a kind of Beckettian purgatory. A fight over peanut butter and toast slowly escalates into a harrowing excavation of the true causes of their deep unhappiness – which are cruelly rooted in the domination of the Catholic Church, the exploitation of the Quebec working class and even in genetics.

When Yours Forever, Marie-Lou premiered, it was set in the present day – and the issues it grappled with were the same ones that Quebec was grappling with at the time, as the Quiet Revolution unfolded. And yet, while Carmen is seen as a force of sexual, religious and political liberation, Tremblay's play does not entirely side with her, resisting propaganda. She seems as trapped by her parents as her sister is – reacting against them in every action. Roberts Smith's hard, bullying performance suggests she may be as deluded as her sister, misguided in her own way.

Leblanc has liberated Tremblay's play a little here, allowing Manon and Carmen to expressionistically move around an apartment full of furniture made out of the mangled remnants of a car. In the original stage directions, all the characters are static – not just the parents, who here sit perched above the stage on car seats. Both Leblanc and set designer Glen Charles Landry are coming at the play for a second time; they worked as director and designer, respectively, on a much-lauded revival in French (with English surtitles) at the Théatre Français de Toronto in 2011.

Leblanc's decision to stick with francophone actors for this English-language production, she writes in the program notes, was motivated out of a desire to work with actors "who were familiar with the pulse, the heartbeat, of this oddly poetic language." Imagine if Soulpepper staged Uncle Vanya with Russian-Canadian actors speaking in their (natural?) Russian accents in order to get at the pulse, the heartbeat of Chekhov – you'd find it a foolish artistic choice and one that limits the play rather than opens it up.

It's the same thing here with Leblanc's production: With Tremblay's text translated into English, the rhythm and poetry of the language inevitably has changed, and, arguably, only anglophone actors with a history of performing for English-Canadian audiences might have the facility the director is seeking. Instead, there is a stiltedness to the acting, a lack of variation in tone, that distances the audience from the action – the only payoff being accents that signal authenticity in a superficial way.

Which isn't to say this cast falls short. Laurin, in particular, gives a finely wrought performance – hinting at how Léopold might have been a good man instead of a monster under different circumstances. But if we're going to reinvent and revisit Tremblay in English Canada today, why not translate or adapt his plays for today? Why not put Marie-Lou into a Jamaican-Canadian context or Muslim-Canadian context – or cast the Asian-Canadian cast of Kim's Convenience in the play but keep it in Quebec? Let's not simply fiddle with the title and burn English Canada's own tradition with Tremblay.