Institutional Framework

THE LATE DEVELOPMENT OF FRENCH-CANADIAN THEATER is above all a result of its institutional framework: For a long time, secular drama was decried as amoral and was therefore prohibited. The clergy, in particular, who made a decisive contribution to the history of drama by encouraging the performance of plays in the collèges for the purpose of classical education, rhetorical training, and the moral edification of pupils, rejected the performance of “profane” texts. Beginning with the 1930s, however, the influence of European theater led to a modernization in the repertoire and the performance practice of clerical theater. Many clergymen also composed their own plays, for example, Antonin Lamarche (1899–1967) and his brother Gustave (1895–1987), who achieved great success with Jonathas (1931) and the open-air theater piece La défaite de l'enfer (1938), and who also wrote numerous mystery plays, clerical plays, and dramatic fragments. Émile Legault (1906–1983) — who has since been acknowledged as the founder of modern French-Canadian drama — wrote clerical plays, too, and welcomed avant-gardist tendencies, for instance, in matters of stage decor. He broke away from the limitation to a religious repertoire and performed not only Christian but also secular classical and modern plays, for example, by Molière, Jean Anouilh, T. S. Eliot, Carlo Goldoni, Luigi Pirandello, and Jean Cocteau, as well as by Jacques Copeau, whose aesthetics had a strong influence on him. In 1937 Legault founded the amateur group Les Compagnons de Saint-Laurent at the Collège Saint-Laurent in Montreal, which later became a professional institution and produced the theater magazine Les Cahiers des Compagnons.