Twelve Opening Acts by Michel Tremblay (review)

Reviews 505 analysed, but from the breadth of this centml claim. Filewod's conceptual model productively illuminates the panicular cases he selects. I am less confident , however, that his model explains "all" of Canadian theatre (a claim that he reiterates in his conclusion) and that these four case studies, and the historical stages they represent, can encompass the totality of Canadian theatrical production. The chapter on the Mummers Troupe, while providing new insight into the success and ultimate collapse of a theatre company too long neglected by Canadian theatre scholarship, could aniculate the terms of that collapse more clearly. Filewod outlines a fascinating narrative on the Troupe's inability to conform to the Canada Council 's entrenched funding and business ideologies, but this pan of the story is less explicitly tied to his thesis than his informative discussion of the ambiguous political inscription of the company 's landmark 1978 production They Cluh Seals. Don't They' Filewod's argument is also strongest when it engages critical literatures directly, aswhen he works with, and expands upon, the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. But there are other ideas circulating in hisanalysis(trans-nationalism, for ex.ample) where a similar degree of engagement with critical literatures concerned with such ideas - panicularly as they apply to Canada - could only strengthen his argument . Finally, it is worth noting that this monograph appears as a special issue of thejournal Textual Studies ill Canada, and that itslayout can make it some-· what uncomfortable to read: each large-format page is divided into two columns of text, disrupted periodically by notes in bold type that cross the columns and can appear at any position on the page. These qualifications aside, Performing Canada is a valuable contribution to Canadian scholarship, theatrical and otherwise, and continues Filewod's welcome challenge to the history and theory of performance in Canada. MICHEL TREMBLAY. Twelve Opening Acts. Trans. Sheila Fischman. Burnaby, BC: Talonbooks, 2002. Pp. 190. $ 18.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Erin Hurley, University ofBritish Columbia Tout Ie drame, se passe dans la coulisse I... 1 . Au lieu de scenes, nous avons des recits. (Victor Hugo, "Preface de Cromwell" (36-37) In his 1827 "Preface de Cromwell," Vietor Hugo lamented neoclassical tragedy's substitution of recits - lengthy monologues recounting events that provide a background or explanatory context crucial to the logic of the onstage drama - for scenes, or onstage dramatic action in dialogue. In Quebecois literature of the I 980s and 1990s, the literary genre of Ie recit - a fi rst-person narration of past events, real or imagined, in fragmented form with minimal narrative logic - emerged as an important mode of ex.pression. 506 REVIEWS Positioned between autobiography and fiction, Ie recit is a lype of life-writing interested more in staging "the experience of a subject occupied with realizing or understanding the self than with describing it" (Mercier 106). U is in the tension between les recits as descriptive expositions and Ie licit as hybrid mode of self-realization that Michel Tremblay's Twelve Opening ACIS finds its voice. Twelve Opening AC ls is the second of four autobiographical works by Tremblay, the first two of which have been winningly translated by Sheila Fischman: Bambi and Me (Les Vues aninll!es, 1990), Twelve Opening AC ls (Dollze coups de II"ifilre, 1992), Un ange cornu avec des ailes de lole (1994), and Bonbons assorlis (2002). In each of these, all of which bear the subtitle Recils, the author reflects on formative events of his childhood and youth through the lenses of cinema, theatre, literature, and varia respectively. The opening act of this collection depicts Tremblay's first experience of seeing a play at the age of six in 1948. At Babar Ihe Elephanl, the narrator discovers that despite deeply feUemotion, he is unable to express himself, to call out to the onstage characters. or to "participate in a collective jubilation" at the plot's happy resolution (28). The collection 's final act tells the story of winning the Best Play award for Le Train in the 1964 Radio-Canada Young Writers Competition. The intervening chaplers are not sequentially organized, as in a standard autobiography, but rdther are thematicaJly linked by the challenge...