During the 1971 launch of Antonine Maillet’s book La Sagouine, Moncton literary types hosted a party they hoped would impress the Montreal guests — high heels, fancy dresses and little glasses of wine. At the suggestion of Maillet, Viola Léger quietly ambled in, dressed as a rumpled washwoman who didn’t give a hoot about propriety — La Sagouine, the book’s fictional protagonist.

Léger went about emptying litter bins, mortifying the locals. A few of them discreetly tried to persuade her to stop working until finally they caught onto the joke. That evening, Léger gave flesh to what has become an iconoclastic icon of Canadian culture, a pretense-poking creation that remains engaging almost 40 years later. Léger was a 41-year-old schoolteacher when she first played La Sagouine, who is 72.

“There’s less makeup now. I have the wrinkles. But the character, she is the same,” says Léger, who, at 80, is finally older than her character. “If there had been fortune teller in 1971 who looked into her crystal ball and told me I’d be playing her now, I would have been scared off. But I keep playing her because they want her.” This time, Pleiades Theatre is presenting two runs of the show at the Berkeley Street Theatre, the first in English, opening May 14, the second in French, opening May 31.

Conceived by Maillet as a series of radio monologues, La Sagouine has become a defining work of Acadian culture, placing the salt-of-the-earth washerwoman up there with more romantic (and more cardboard) characters such as Evangeline and Gabriel. Like Mickey Mouse, the character has inspired TV shows and a theme park (Le Pays de la Sagouine in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, promises smoked herring, fiddle music and fortune-telling).

The daughter of a cod fisherman, the wife of an oyster and smelt fisherman, La Sagouine never got any further from the sea than her bucket of soapy water, though, in her 16 monologues, she musters an offbeat opinion about everything from war to youth to lotteries. Coinciding with Canada’s Acadian renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s — during which it became acceptable and even desirable for Atlantic Canadians to speak French and identify with their roots — La Sagouine captured a particular kind of early-20th-century underdog. She’s not impressed by big country homes, prefers chewing tobacco to cigarettes and, if she ever had enough money to travel, would venture as far as Nova Scotia to see some bagpipers.

But the character has lasted for 40 years because there is also something deeply universal about her. She’s a classic reject. Thrown out of the Roman Catholic church (and therefore into the fires of Hell), marginalized by political types because she doesn’t pay taxes, poor and uneducated, her street smarts allow her to see things that more privileged people do not. She may be a pastoral creature, but her 21st-century successors are decidedly urban. New Canadians, mentally and physically challenged people and other minorities have taken her place on the outside looking in.

“It’s these people without a voice in today’s society — that’s exactly, I hope, how the public recognizes her,” says Léger. “Will these people be at the show? I don’t know.”

Having herself grown up in Massachusetts during the Depression, Léger relates to the pleasure La Sagouine takes in small successes, how every small step forward deserves to be celebrated rather than measured against what others have. She remembers getting five cents for a good report card, reflecting how badly her parents wanted her to finish secondary school. (She eventually went to university.) On this continent, there is always someone trying to make the most out of less.

Maillet and Léger are still close and, over the years, they’ve tossed around the idea of revising the original 1971 text. But they’ve come to realize that the world changing around La Sagouine doesn’t impair her relevance; it shines new light on it. “We prefer to leave it as it is. The exterior things may be different, but that’s all."