By Michel Tremblay. Translated by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco. Directed by Diane Brown. A Ruby Slippers Theatre production. At the Gateway Theatre on Saturday, September 29. Continues until October 6

There are moments of terrific theatricality and a cast to die for in this production of Les Belles-soeurs. But there is also a surprising number of longueurs, perhaps because some parts of Michel Tremblay’ 50-year-old classic don’t translate seamlessly into this time and place.

Tremblay’s heroine, Germaine Lauzon, has won a jackpot of a million trading stamps—enough to buy her a houseful of new furniture. But first the stamps need to be pasted into their booklets, so she’s invited all her sisters and friends over to help. The first guest to arrive admits to being jealous; as the party grows, so does the simmering undercurrent of envy and petty betrayal, climaxing in the arrival of Pierrette, Germaine’s estranged—and disgraced—youngest sister.

When the play was first produced in French in 1968, it broke boundaries with its use of joual, a defiantly working-class Quebec dialect, and by pulling back the curtains on the miserable lives of working-class women through highly theatrical monologues and choral sequences. “This stupid, rotten life,” five women intone together, seated at the front of the stage and dramatically lit from below as they recite their daily routine of laundry, cooking, cleaning. “But at night, we watch TV,” they all sigh at the end of each day’s catalogue, their faces bathed in a blue glow.

Director Diane Brown and her cast of 15 do a terrific job with these stylized sequences, including an ode to bingo and the women’s synchronized theft of the stamp booklets. Among a strong ensemble, there’s solid work from Pippa Mackie as Germaine’s rebellious daughter, Linda; Sarah Rodgers as the well-off Lisette de Courval; and Sarah May Redmond as put-upon neighbour Thérèse Dubuc.

And some of the most emotionally resonant moments come from characters who have consolations other than television. Eileen Barrett’s Des-Neiges Verrette gives an affecting monologue about the monthly (platonic) visits of a travelling salesman. When spinster Angéline Sauvé is exposed as being a regular visitor to a nightclub, the older women exclaim in unison, “Dear God, this is disgraceful!” while the younger ones cry, “Holy shit, that’s great!” Then a note-perfect Kerry Sandomirsky delivers the play’s most open-hearted monologue, as Angéline must choose between the one source of joy in her life and her judgmental friends.

For long stretches, though, the play has a strangely lifeless quality. Some of Tremblay’s material doesn’t transcend its origins: a joke about a nun getting raped may have been an expression of rage against the repressive Catholic Church in 1960s Quebec, but in 2018, it’s not funny. Neither is repeatedly hitting an elderly woman in a wheelchair. And since there’s no English-Canadian equivalent of joual, John Van Burek and Bill Glassco’s 1972 translation feels artificial in places, further distancing us from the characters.

A wooden crucifix looms over the filthy kitchen in Drew Facey’s set; and much like these women’s lives, Ellen Gu’s costumes are simultaneously colourful and drab.

Fifty years on, it’s the moments of hope that offer the most satisfaction in Les Belles-soeurs, but there aren’t many. Despair and bitterness—the main sustenance in these women’s lives—can only carry an audience so far.