Deirdre Kinahan’s Unmanageable Sisters: Michel Tremblay’s Belles-sœurs on the Irish Stage

Abstract

In spring 2018, Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, an adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s landmark Les belles-sœurs (1968), was performed in the Abbey Theatre. A “smash hit” (Abbey programme) with the Irish audience, it was restaged in summer 2019. The Dublin version by a young and accomplished Irish playwright stages the comparability of the language register and of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that inspired the original thus underlining the connection between the two theater communities. It also demonstrates theater’s role in voicing the language, lives, and daily traumas of impoverished, undereducated, and marginalized women. This study contends that Tremblay’s and Kinahan’s success is attributable to the dramaturges’ understanding, interpretation, and staging of the intersectionality of the issues addressed. Intersectionality focuses on the layering and interaction of multiple sources of power, oppression, and marginalization. Previous English translations did not capture the intersectionality central to the original.