Michel Tremblay adapte Mistero buffo: les questions de l'oralité

Michel Tremblay is certainly the most celebrated Quebec playwright. Renowned for his plays and novels, which have been translated into several languages, he has been at the same time one of the most prolific drama translators/adapters of his time, with around forty translations since the end of the 1960s. In 1973, Tremblay adapted one of Dario Fo's most famous works, Mistero buffo. This adaptation has been studied on several occasions, notably by Jane Dunnett (1996; 1997; 2001; 2006) and, more recently, in a volume on the playwright's translational-adaptive work (Ladouceur et al. 2017). However, Tremblay’s Mistero buffo was almost always approached from a sociocritical point of view: the use of joual and the appropriation of the text were read systematically, and only, as functional to the playwright's separatist/autonomist aspirations. A micro-textual approach seems to be still lacking. Our contribution will try to read Michel Tremblay's work from the point of view of its writing and its relationship to orality. A few words on the history of this adaptation and its source will be followed by a series of examples through which we hope to shed light on the treatment of the rather peculiar form of orality of the source text. In the first part, we will obviously have to quickly review the social and historical reasons for this adaptation.