Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Michel Tremblay,
directed by Micheline Chevrier
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 10-October 10, 2009
"The Quincunx"
With “Albertine in Five Times” the Shaw Festival is staging its first play by Michel Tremblay in a fine new translation by Linda Gaboriau. One supposes the 1984 play fits into the Festival’s expanded mandate since the fictional Albertine, born in 1912, has lived more than half her life during the period of Shaw lifetime (1856-1950). We meet her in 1982 at age 70 when she has just arrived in a retirement home. There, left alone with her memories, she converses with herself at the ages of 30, 40, 50 and 60, as represented by four other women, and with her sister and only confidante Madeleine. The play provides a wonderful showcase for the some of the Festival’s strongest actresses, but the play and the direction leave a number of questions unresolved, most notably how a woman who has been filled with such rage throughout her life can possibly settle into the confinement of her new life.
Director Micheline Chevrier has arranged the five Albertines in the form of a quincunx with Albertine at 70 (Patricia Hamilton) at the centre, the Albertines at 30 and 40 (Marla McLean and Jenny L. Wright) behind her and the Albertines at 60 and 50 in front of her. This establishes two diagonals representing opposing forces within Albertine with Albertine at 70 at their intersection. The Albertines at 30 and 50 are the most optimistic, the first recuperating in the countryside and enjoying a sense of peace for the first time, the second having made hard decisions regarding her two difficult children and enjoying the independence and sense of self-worth her first job gives her. On the other axis are the Albertines of 40 and 60, both bitter and cynical--the first fed up with her life, her children and her relatives‘ meddling, the second addicted to sedatives after a family disaster and in a state that no longer cares about anything. Chevrier makes quite clear that Albertine at 70 in trying to adjust to her new abode is trying to identify with the selves at ages 30 and 50 and to exclude the negativity of her selves at 40 and 60.
Providing a contrast to the five conflicted Albertines is Madeleine (Nicola Correia-Damude), who in her short life was happy in all the ways Albertine was not--happy in love, in marriage, with her children, with herself. Her presence makes us want to know what caused these two sisters to have such different personalities and such different lives. Tremblay’s answer seems to point to an inexplicable fate. The youngest Albertine tells us that she has always been filled with a barely controllable rage, the the desire to destroy, and indeed she is resting in the country after having vented that rage against her own daughter. Through a choral section for the five Albertines, Chevrier, like the Albertines, tries to point the finger at men as the cause, when in fact, the youngest Albertine’s statement along with Madeleine’s happiness with her husband suggest that Albertine’s rage does not have such a reductive cause and may reflect rather an inchoate perception of her existential status. She perceives the ultimate meaninglessness of life but personalizes it. The young Albertine says outright that when she was beating her daughter she knew she was really trying to strike out at life.
All six actors give superb performances. Hamilton’s look of apprehension and resignation in accepting her room as the last place she will ever be makes anyone shiver in recognition who has relatives in a retirement or nursing home. She radiates a gratefulness to be alive, but her fierceness of her attitude towards Albertine at 60 suggests issues that are unresolved. McLean at first exudes the warmth and joy of youth, but when we find out exactly why she is resting in the country the savageness that breaks out is terrifying. Wright gives an extraordinarily intense performance as Albertine at 40, a portrait of a soul in hell, the anger turned outward that so alienates Madeleine is equal to the anger turned inward on herself. She is like a fire consuming itself but which, paradoxically, creates a chill all around it.
Haney is equally intense as a character in denial. She gives all of Albertine at 50’s lines of self-promotion, her praise of herself, her independence and her hard decisions, such a sharp edge that it seems as if she realizes the hollowness that lies beneath. Thatcher as Albertine at 60 has to struggle with a problem not of her making. This Albertine after the shock of her daughter’s death has let herself go and drifted into addiction and deliberate isolation. Designer Teresa Przybylski clothes her in a dirty dressing gown and slippers but gives her a wig of long yellowing grey hair that makes her look as if she were 90 not 60. The photographs in the programme make it quite obvious that the hairline on Thatcher’s wig recedes far too much compared to the hairline on Hamilton as Albertine at 70. How is it no one noticed this? This flaw in costuming will make most people, even those who know the play, believe that Thatcher represents an Albertine of a decade or so beyond Hamilton and that Albertine at 70’s strenuous rejection of Thatcher’s character has to do with rejecting the depressing image of what she will become. At least as Chevrier has directed the play, this works as a more plausible explanation of their relationship. Since Tremblay’s text does not make Albertine at 60’s age clear until about halfway through the play, Przybylski’s design leads only to confusion.
Despite this, Thatcher shows that the rage that motivates Albertine is still there even though Albertine at 60 uses pill after pill to dull it. Correia-Damude is well cast as the counterbalance to these five aspects of a woman’s anger and guilt. Beaming with health and poise she makes the desiccation of the others’ world views look all the more desolate. She also makes clear that the consciously satisfied Madeleine could, without wishing to, easily be mistaken for flaunting her happiness and provoking jealousy and resentment in an unstable nature like Albertine’s.
Przybylski’s set consisting of abstract grillwork gives audiences little of interest to look at though it does suggest the both the balconies of Montreal as well as the cage that all five Albertines feel around them. It really falls to Ereca Hassell’s complex lighting to reinforce the constantly changing moods of the piece and the constantly changing alignments of some parts of Albertine against the the others.
Chevrier’s direction endeavours to bring out the pathos of all the women’s situations, even though that actually works counter to the text. Various Albertines state that she cannot cry and that she would be happy if she finally could. Yet, McLean and Wright, in particular, present their characters with such emotion that they do cry, in spite of themselves. This makes us wonder if Chevrier has not really got a firm hold on what kind of woman Albertine is, i.e. a woman who looks at the world not emotionally but with a dry-eyed rage. It is love that Albertine longs for, to give and to receive, but that is exactly, for reasons that remain mysterious, what she lacks. Chevrier seems not to have found the key to bringing out Albertine’s pain of an internal and external deficit of love without sentiment. If the production as a whole is not fully satisfying, the talent of the cast is never in doubt and in fact bowls you over with its power.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of Albertine in Five Times. ©David Cooper.
2009-07-20
Albertine in Five Times