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For three years, Evelyne de la Chenelière wrote on the entrance wall of Montréal’s Espace GO theatre as part of an artistic residency that would profoundly shake her practice. The culmination of this is La vie utile [translated as Ravage of Life], a bold departure from prevailing norms where the author breaks with textual and performative conventions in her dramatization of a multi-faceted instant between life and death.
In this experimental play—preceded by an original essay about its creative process—bits and pieces of a family’s realities unfold in a non-linear simultaneity that reflects, with captivating irony, the difficulties encountered when language is expected to facilitate communication.
Ravage of Life is a challenging invitation to eviscerate literature and conceive a space where words find their body, freeing poetic expression from grammatical constraints, logic, and structure in order to embrace the limitlessness of living thought.
Writer and actress Evelyne de la Chenelière is an essential figure in the Quebec theatre and playwriting scene. Her plays, translated and performed in Quebec and Canada as well as elsewhere in the world, question the limits of language and the experience of writing. In 2017 she was a finalist for the Siminovitch Prize for excellence and innovation in Canadian theatre. Her play Bashir Lazhar was adapted into a film by director Philippe Falardeau under the title Monsieur Lazhar and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Her most recent play, Le traitement de la nuit, was directed by Denis Marleau in Montreal, and produced in Frankfurt in a German translation. It was also presented in a staged reading at the Comédie Française in Paris.
Louise H. Forsyth (1935–2024) was a trailblazing academic who specialized in French Canadian literature and taught drama, poetry, and women’s and gender studies at Western University and the University of Saskatchewan. She was a founding member of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and held several administrative positions throughout her career. Her many published articles, books, translations, and scholarly papers on Québec women playwrights and poets includes the three-volume Anthology of Québec Women’s Plays in English Translation, Marie Savard’s Bien à moi (Mine Sincerely), Nicole Brossard: Essays on her Works, and Mobility of Light: The Poetry of Nicole Brossard.