Virtually none of novelist-poet Marie-Claire Blais’s plays have been read or performed in English. From this book it is easy to see why. Wintersleep is a collection of five chamber plays (written in the late 1970s) of which four were performed on Radio-Canada and one (the title piece) was given a staged reading in Paris. Although translator Nigel Spencer makes big claims for the work in his introduction – invoking Ibsen, Strindberg, Yeats, and Pinter, and falsely stating that Blais’s shifts in voice, point of view, and layers of consciousness are rarely available in cinema or fiction – the plays fail to be anything more than abstract pieces about the tensions of human relationships.

Blais’s feminism dominates her poetic lyricism. “Ghost of a Voice,” the first play, is a platonic dialogue between Anna, an opera singer, and her man, whose passion is music but whose self-absorption has stifled her creative voice. The piece is plaintive, charged by a declamatory tone that suffocates reality under a mass of pretentious language. Anna sounds either strident or academic as she struggles for psychological and artistic liberation.

Women in revolt is a leitmotif, evident in “A Couple” and “Fever.” In the former, the woman is a random romantic; the man a devotee of rigid, middle-class structures that shrivel her heart. Their interior monologues are shot through with self-conscious poetry contaminated by banalities.

“Fever” is more successful. It expresses in a Pinteresque way the crumbling of a marriage during a couple’s holiday in an Arab country. The husband blames his wife’s revolt on a fever, although it is clear that his fierce pleading will not be a curative.

Blais is language-driven, but not in a theatrical mode. The tone of “Exile,” for example, is detached and distant, partly because of Spencer’s translation, but mainly owing to its setting (some vague oligarchy) and characters that are conceived as abstractions and revealed in dry, academic writing.

The title play uses blocking, lighting, set design, doubling, special effects, and a reworking of a medieval morality ritual with hints of ballet. However, it’s tediously melancholy in its portrayal of a deceased man caught in suspension at the moment of death. Blais’s abstractionism predominates: images of a burning bed and an Arctic landscape are meant to suggest surrealism, but the deceased, manipulated by others, is simply a ghost with no voice.