The Audience-driven Aesthetic of Recent Canadian Political Plays

The 1996 National Film Board film, Fermano, His Life on Stage, features an important discussion between playwright David Fennario and the former artistic director of Montréal’s Centaur Theatre, Maurice Podbrey. In it Podbrey notes Fennario’s success at the Centaur theatre with such political plays as On the Job and Balconville. There can be little doubt about the political impact of Balconville in 1970s Québec: it was and remains one the most important works in the history of English-Canadian theatre history in that province. Produced at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre two years after the election to power of the Parti Québécois and two year’s before Quebec’s first referendum on sovereignty, it used formal means as much as thematic content to confront anglo Quebecers with the new reality that history was forcing them to confront. As the name suggests, Balconville takes place on the balconies of a rental property in the southwest of Montréal, where working-class Anglophones and Francophones live beside each other without every really trying to understand each other. Yet the play demonstrates, often through humour, working-class families who have the same problems with gender relations and landlords, whichever of Montreal’s two dominant languages they are speaking. In formal terms, the play presented a distinct challenge for the audience, as it was played in both French and English. The choice to have Marc Gélinas, a Francophone actor, play his role in a very vernacular Québécois French, which was more than a little difficult for anglo Quebecers of the time (schooled in the regularly conjugated version of the language) to understand, challenged Centaur’s audience (see MacLeod). In effect, for Montréal Anglophone audiences of the time, to try to understand the action of this play was to face the new realities of a Québec where one could either retreat into a unilingual English ghetto or make an attempt to communicate despite the fear that one was never completely understanding what was said. Yet in his discussion of this important work in the film, Fennario announces that he considers Balconville a failure, largely because of the middle-class audiences to whom it was presented. Centaur’s audience, Fennario tells Podbrey, could and would never really rise to the challenge Balconville posed and this in itself made the production less politically effective than it might otherwise have been (qtd. in MacLeod).

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