Tuesday 10 November 2009

Les fées ont soif.

It was 31 years ago today that extreme, fundamentalist, ultra-conservative catholics tried to stop the opening of the controversial feminist play "Les fées ont soif." in Montréal.
Though Catholics did everything they could to keep the show from going on (including picketing the theatre and reciting the rosary in the audience during the play), the work went on to several translations and productions here and abroad and the published play went into three printings.
From here:

A whore, a housewife, and the holy virgin walk into a bar. Ouch! But seriously folks, it's no joke for these three ladies desperately trying to find themselves in an oppressive world. Montreal playwright Denise Boucher unconventionally explores the oh-too conventional achetypes of women.

After all we've achieved, how far have we come? The most notorious case of theatre censorship in contemporary Quebec was the attempted ban of Les Fées ont soif when it was first produced almost 30 years ago at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. The play challenged traditional roles and images imposed by social practice and dramatized women's angry rejection of those roles.

These issues persist today, as women's shelters from increasinly beyond their capacity, as sex workers are forced into dangerous situations by outdated laws, and as 'women's work' continues to be undervalued - the fairies are still thirsty!

The author Denise Boucher also wrote "Jézabel", an alternate version of the biblical confrontation between the heathen queen and the testerical prophet Elijah.

No comments:

Post a Comment