Talisman Theatre brings new French-language Quebec plays to anglophone audiences
Talisman Theatre was born to build bridges. Its mandate is to introduce new French-language Quebec plays to anglophone audiences via translation, and its latest work was The Flood Thereafter (Le Deluge apres) by Sarah Berthiaume, translated into English by Nadine Desrochers, opening at Theatre La Chapelle. The company operates in a city where two large cultures share a metro system, a weather forecast and almost nothing on stage.
The two-solitudes problem, staged
Tibaldo, asked how she approaches cross-cultural work, refused to give a general answer. "It absolutely depends on the play that's being translated," she said. "There's the gamut of opinions about putting it into a different cultural context. What do you do about jokes? Religion? What are those boundaries? I think they change according to who your intended audience is."
That is a more sophisticated position than it first sounds. It rejects the two comfortable extremes. One extreme domesticates everything, relocating the play to somewhere the audience already knows, and in doing so quietly erases the culture it claimed to be introducing. The other preserves every reference intact and hands the audience a text they admire without understanding. Both are ways of avoiding the actual decision, which has to be made line by line.
Jokes and religion are the hard cases for a reason
Tibaldo picked her two examples well. They are the places where Quebec French is least portable.
- Jokes depend on shared knowledge and on timing. A pun cannot be carried across; it must be rebuilt from local materials or abandoned. And a joke that lands late is not a joke.
- Religion in Quebec is not a matter of belief but of vocabulary. The province's swearing is built from Catholic liturgy. Tabarnak, calisse, osti. These are not translatable into English profanity, which draws on sex and the body instead. Render them literally and you get liturgical nonsense. Render them as English swearing and you lose the entire history of a society's relationship with the Church, which is often exactly what the line is about.
Every serious act of literary translation runs into this wall. The theatre version is harsher, because there are no footnotes and no rereading. The audience gets one pass, in the dark, at the speed the actors choose.
The generalised backwater
The production made one revealing compromise. Because The Flood Thereafter was being presented in Montreal, the creators presumed everyone was aware of the cultural references. But they did generalise the location of the backwater town, just in case the show toured or found an out-of-province market.
That single decision contains the entire economics of the form. A play rooted precisely enough in one place to be true is a play that may never travel. Sand off the specifics and it travels, but it arrives as a story about nowhere. Berthiaume's team split the difference: keep the references, blur the map. Whether that is a compromise or a solution probably depends on which performance you attend.
The audience that never comes
Tibaldo's sharpest observation was sociological rather than linguistic. "A lot of anglophones never go to see French theatre," she said. "We all take the metro together. We all see the same advertisements, we all go to the movies, or concerts, together. We share so much of our culture, except for theatre."
The exception is not accidental. Music and film cross the language line easily, one because it barely needs words and the other because it has subtitles. Theatre has neither advantage. Live performance demands comprehension in real time, and it demands it for two hours in a dark room with no pause button. Faced with that, most people simply stay home, and a city that shares almost everything ends up with two entirely separate stages.
Technology has chipped away at the barrier. Surtitles projected above the stage let a francophone company play to a mixed house without recasting or re-rehearsing, which is why they have become standard in opera and increasingly common in drama. They are a compromise, dividing the audience's attention between the actor's face and a line of text, but they are cheaper and faster than a full production in translation. The same argument about how much a viewer loses when meaning arrives as text runs endlessly in cinema, where the choice between subtitled french to english translation and dubbing has never been settled and probably never will be.
The translator's actual working day
Nadine Desrochers, translating Berthiaume, faced constraints that a novel's translator never meets. A line must be speakable. It must fit the breath of an actor crossing a stage. It must land its beat at the same moment the lighting cue fires, because the director blocked the scene to the French rhythm and will not rebuild it. Sentence length is not a stylistic preference in theatre translation; it is a physical property of the production.
Then comes the rehearsal room, where the text stops being finished. Actors find lines that read beautifully and cannot be said. Directors cut. A joke that survived on the page dies at the first run-through and has to be replaced by Thursday. Theatre translators who work well are the ones who accept that their draft is an opening position rather than a verdict, which is a temperament as much as a skill.
Why a full translation still matters
Surtitles let anglophones watch a French play. A translated production lets them see it performed by actors thinking in their language, with rhythms built for their ear. It is a much larger investment and it produces a genuinely different object: not a French play made accessible, but an English play descended from a French one, with its own life and its own reviews.
That is the bridge Talisman was built to construct, one play at a time, in a city where the traffic in both directions has always been lighter than the geography would suggest. Tibaldo hoped The Flood Thereafter would turn the tide. Montreal theatregoers, who discuss the linguistic divide with weary familiarity in forums like r/montreal, have heard that hope before. It is still worth having.
What the traffic looks like in reverse
The imbalance runs both ways, and it is worth naming. Quebec playwrights are translated into English and performed in Toronto and beyond; English-Canadian work crosses into French far less often. Berthiaume herself has since become one of the most translated dramatists of her generation, which suggests the bridge does carry weight when someone bothers to build it. What remains scarce is not talent or material. It is the willingness of a producer to gamble a season on a play the audience has never heard of, written in a language most of them stopped studying at sixteen.