Description

This play takes a crate of gift stamps, a Montreal kitchen, and 15 women, and mixing fast-moving dialogue, monologue and chorus, produces a critique of "women's place", Quebec society, and modern consumerism. It created uproar when first performed in 1968, being both vilified for its parochial vulgarity and praised for its revelation of the dynamic resources of popular language.

In the perspectives newly opened by the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Michel Tremblay's depiction of the women's squabbles is a devastating critique, at once comic and bleak, of the traditional Quebec ideal of Catholic wife and mother. Killick's introduction begins by situating the realistic presentation of female subordination, under-achievement and frustration with the cultural development of modern Quebec. She then shows how it achieves added resonance as a symbol of the closed horizons of Quebec society, and more broadly, exceeding the purely Canadian context as a biting indictment of materialistic values, Finally Les Belles-Soeurs is examined as a virtuoso theatrical experiment combining traditional dialogue and the classical unities of time, space and action with the individual and group voices of cabaret and chorale. A glossary is provided for linguistic difficulties.