Gratien Gélinas

A Montreal critic, after the first performance of Tit-Coq, wrote, “Literary historians will no longer be able to say that dramatic literature does not exist in French Canada.”

He was right. On opening night, May 22, 1948, Gratien Gélinas, as playwright and actor, went beyond his long-established Fridolinons revues to create a dramatic production that reflected and drew attention to a truly French-Canadian perspective.

Tit-Coq ran for almost a year, first in French, then English, and was lavishly praised by the critics and the public in both languages. It then ventured to stages in Chicago and New York where audiences at first had difficulty understanding a relatively simple plot. In the play, a French-Canadian orphan becomes a soldier, meets a young woman and her family before going overseas but, while he is serving overseas, she marries another man. On his return, both realize they still love each other but can do nothing about it, mainly because divorce is out of the question because of the religious convictions of her family and the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

The play itself had evolved from an earlier successful revue called Fridolinons which Gélinas, as writer and actor, had created for radio in 1937. His first professional acting role, five years prior to this, had been a major part in a serialized radio program while he was, at the same time, working for an insurance company, a job he began in 1929 at age 20. He had loved performing since childhood but had never considered acting as a full-time occupation until, with his wife’s encouragement, he quit his job in 1937 to launch the radio character Fridolin on a local French station.

Fridolin was an instant success in Quebec! Within months, Fridolin became a household surname with the station warning listeners against false productions. Gélinas then decided to stage the monologue as an annual revue. He continued with both radio and the revue until 1942 when he gave up radio to concentrate on the stage production that continued until 1946.

On stage, Gélinas took greater liberties in language than he could with radio and also moved from short sketches to complete plays, but the character remained the same. Fridolin was a puny young teenager from the slums of East Montreal who carried a sling shot and wore short pants held up with suspenders over a tricolour hockey sweater and knee socks that were always askew. Fridolin, played by Gélinas, spoke the language of the people, suffered their frustrations, cursed their curses, and commented candidly on authority, skillfully combining humour with pathos to attract audiences from every social and educational level of French-Canadian society. One reviewer in 1946 pronounced that Gélinas was doing for Canada “what the Abbey Theatre did for Ireland and the Moscow Art Theatre for Russia.”

With the success of Tit-Coq, Gélinas received honorary doctorates from the universities of Montreal and Toronto. He made a film version of the play in 1953, and in 1956 starred in the Stratford Festival (Ontario) productions of Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In 1958 he founded La Comédie canadienne and wrote, directed, and starred in his second major play, Bousille et les justes, which was eventually staged more than 300 times in 26 different Canadian cities. That year he also became a member of the Royal Society of Canada, where he was introduced as belonging “to the tradition of Chaplin, Molière and those other moralists who have chosen to purge society of its follies by making it laugh at itself.”

A year later he was a founding member of the National Theatre School of Canada and, in 1966, wrote what many consider his most sophisticated play, Heir les enfants dansaient (Yesterday the Children Were Dancing).

This play was praised, particularly in English Canada, as a breakthrough in communication between the French and English communities of Canada. The late Nathan Cohen, entertainment critic of The Toronto Daily Star commented, “At last ... a play that deals directly and forthrightly with the central fact of Canadian conscience ... a play which disturbs, unsettles, and amuses, and vaults to an extraordinary level of political insight.”

Working within a popular tradition, Gélinas brilliantly connected Canada’s two distinct peoples by prodding cultural funny bones and generating intellectual laughter.