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Michel Tremblay.
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Michel Tremblay is the first Canadian playwright to have won international recognition. His plays have been translated into many languages and performed successfully on three continents. Starting from...
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Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
Though ["Hosanna"] goes over homosexual materials with which we are twice too familiar, and while it tells more than it shows, the play creates a fully...
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Critical Essay by 1. Rue Fabre: Daily Life, the Family
The street on which he grew up, the people on that street and, in particular, the noisy, crowded quarters where he was forced to spend his childh...
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Critical Essay by 2. the Main: Nightlife, Prostitution, Homosexuality
This is a world of false glitter and real pathos: the world of La Duchesse de Langeais, of Hosanna, of Berthe, Carlotta and Gloria...
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Critical Essay by 3. the Great Beyond ("le Grand Ailleurs"): Gods, Sinners, and Fantasies
Tremblay's novel of pure fantasy, La Cité dans l'oeuf, came out in 1968, th...
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Critical Essay by Elaine R. Hopkins
Les Anciennes Odeurs, is a play about feelings, more specifically about the tenderness that remains in a relationship after the passion of love has died. (p. 796)
L...
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Critical Essay by Ellen R. Babby
Michel Tremblay's most recent novel, La Duchesse et le roturier, constitutes the third of the "Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal," preceded by La G...
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Critical Essay by Martin Knelman
The title character of Saint Carmen of the Main is a woman, and not a writer but a popular singer in a sleazy nightclub in the East End of Montréal. But when Ca...
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Critical Essay by Mark Czarnecki
Overeating is just one of many obsessions Tremblay explores in La Grosse Femme (the full title means "the fat lady next door is pregnant"). The book is a...
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Critical Essay by John Ripley
In slightly more than a decade of sustained productivity, Michel Tremblay created no less than eleven plays set in the working-class environment of east-end Montreal. Wit...
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Critical Essay by Roger Ellis
Although practically unknown to theatre audiences in this country, Tremblay is one of Canada's leading dramatists. Bonjour là Bonjour (1974), received sharp...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Hill
The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant … lives up to the promise of its marvellously evocative cover—a hand-tinted photograph, from a family album, of the aut...
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Critical Essay by Paula Gilbert Lewis
In 1978 Tremblay abandoned the dramatic form and published La Grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte, the first novel of his proposed tril...
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Critical Essay by Boyd Neil
Even in translation, it is obvious that [Tremblay] is a formidable wordsmith. His dialogues are spare and forceful. Words are used not just to explain character but to expr...
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Critical Essay by Renate Usmiani
From the beginning, [Tremblay] managed to achieve a double synthesis: a synthesis of the major theatrical traditions which, at least potentially, come together in cont...
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In the following essay, McQuaid explains Tremblay's success in English Canada by examining the social concerns, "highly" theatrical nature, and indigenous québécois ...
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In the essay below, Serafin discusses how Tremblay's use of language affects the theatricality, characterization, humor, and dialogue of the five plays comprising La Duchesse de Langeais, and O...
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In the favorable review below, Moss summarizes the plot and themes of Thérèse et Pierrette.
Shelia Fischman has performed another valuable service for Anglophones in translating Michel T...
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In the following review, Strunk finds Remember Me "a fine monodramatic miniature."
[Remember Me is the translation] of Michel Tremblay's Les Anciennes Odeurs (1981), a one-act pie...
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In the following review, Paul comments on Tremblay's critique of patriarchy in Albertine in Five Times.
The chief difficulty in translating [Albertine in Five Times], originally published in Fr...
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In the favorable review below, Kroller relates the plot of Le Premier quartier de la lune.
Le Premier quartier de la lune concludes Tremblay's five-volume "Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Roy...
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Critical Review by Kathy Mezei
SOURCE; "Poet's Dilemma," in Canadian Literature, Vol. 135, Winter, 1992, pp. 130-31.
In the review below, Mezei faults Tremblay's "cl...
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