About the Play:

The Driving Force (English version of L'impératif présent) is a full-length drama by Michel Tremblay, translated by Linda Gaboriau. Father and son wrestle with their troubled relationship in the bathroom of a nursing home. Alex is isolated in a deep silence. Claude visits him, takes care of him, washes him, and doesn't stop talking to him. The son facing the father, the father facing the son. Each of them alone with his hatred in front of the one who never understood him.

The Driving Force updates characters seen in The Real World? – thirty years have gone by. In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer's ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues — to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them. In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visits his son Claude in the same Alzheimer's ward, and it is Alex's turn to rant and rail at what he perceives to be his mute son's contempt for his own working class life. With a cruel and disconsolate irony, we come to see that his father's lifelong attempt to mock and censure Claude's work as consisting of nothing but mediocre, misrepresentative lies, has been the very driving force behind Claude's compulsion to continue to reveal the truth of human relationships as he so desperately wants his father to understand it.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

About the Playwright:

Michel Tremblay has been one of Québec's most prominent playwrights since the end of the 1960s. One of the most produced and the most prominent playwrights in the history of Canadian theatre, he has received countless prestigious honours and accolades. His dramatic, literary and autobiographical works, originally written in French, have long enjoyed remarkable international popularity and translations of his plays have received huge success worldwide.