It was not a phrase I dwelt over. Certainly, I did not expect it to have staying power. But when I wrote that Michel Tremblay was “the best playwright Scotland never had” in a 1992 review of The House Among the Stars, it struck a chord.
Within a few days, my comment about the Quebecois dramatist had found its way into a headline in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. That was the entry point into countless citations in Canadian academic journals and books. Now, here it is again, slightly misquoted (“the best” has become “the greatest”), on the jackets of these two anthologies of Tremblay’s plays as rendered into Scots by the transatlantic team of Martin Bowman and the late Bill Findlay, who died in 2005.
So what did I mean? Tremblay, of course, is every bit the Montreal playwright. Born in 1942, he made his name giving poetic voice to the working-class French speakers he grew up with, not least with his 1968 debut Les Belles-soeurs, about a woman who throws a party to help her process the million trading stamps she has won in a lottery. [READ MORE]