Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by Michel Tremblay, directed by Jean Stéphane Roy
Théâtre français de Toronto and Théâtre La Catapulte, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
April 19-28, 2013
“An Albertine for All Time”
Director Jean Stéphane Roy has created the best production of Albertine en cinq temps you are ever likely to see. A co-production between the Theâtre français de Toronto and Theâtre La Catapulte of Ottawa, Roy has stripped Michel Tremblay’s 1984 masterpiece down to its essentials and in so doing has found more resonance in the work than any previous production I’ve seen.
The usual presentation of the work supposes that we first meet Albertine 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. Jean Stéphane Roy takes quite a different view. There is no indication in the text that privileges one Albertine over another. The point is that they are all versions of the same woman and the fact that they debate among each other suggests that they exist simultaneously within her. If that is the case, Roy, asks, why take the pedestrian view that the most aged Albertine is reflecting on her past. Indeed, in an exciting new interpretation, Roy takes the reverse view and suggests that Madeleine gives Albertine at age 30 (Mélanie Beauchamp) a view of the trials life has in store for her.
Under Roy, the play becomes a theatrical construct along the lines of El gran teatro del mundo (1655), the famous auto sacramental of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Calderón’s play shows the audience the various roles that man may play during his lifetime – el Rey, el Rico, el Pobre, el Labrador , etc. Here, Roy imagines the play as a display of the various roles that Albertine will play throughout her lifetime, with each of the five versions of the same individual claiming her own version is the true Albertine when, of course, they all are.
To emphasize the theatricality of the play, Roy has the five Albertines situated on dais built of wooden planks suggesting the origin of the word for stage, tréteaux in French, or “trestles”. Roy has the play begin by having Madeleine (Geneviève Dufour) remove the ghost light (a light left going on the stage when the theatre is empty) that has stood in front of a red curtain. Then Madeleine raises the curtain to reveal the five Albertines. At the end of the play, Madeleine lowers the curtain to conceal four of the five Albertines and replaces the ghost light, now coloured red, the colour of the moon that they all have seen. Roy thus makes Madeleine much more than the Albertines’ confidante but also the stage manager and prompter of Albertine’s story.
Unlike Micheline Chevrier’s direction of the play for the Shaw Festival in 2009, Roy is not interested in showing the links among the five Albertine as if the play were a naturalistic drama. Rather, he makes sure they are as different as possible from each other. Roy’s approach has the revelatory effect of changing our view of the entire play. It is no longer a play simply about one of Tremblay’s many characters from his “Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal”. Instead, it becomes a choral drama about the plight of women in general, with Albertine as someone who has throughout her life has experienced everything – both the frustrations and the pleasures of womanhood as daughter, spouse and mother, as a dependent and an independent person and as someone whose life has zigzagged between rage and contentment. By finding the universal in the particular, Roy unlocks the element that makes gives this play such enormous resonance.
Realizing its universal implications, Roy staged the play as a choral drama on the model of such women-centred ancient Greek tragedies as Euripides’ The Trojan Women, where the chorus itself is the main character. Thus the characters speak as individuals but quite often in unison as a chorus, sometimes with Madeleine acting as the coryphaeus or choral leader. Freed from the constraints of naturalism he has the women move as they speak (as did the Greek chorus), creating patterns that reflect their words. At one point five of them form a diagonal line across the stage to confront Albertine at 30, who must realize that they are the future she faces.
The only prop on Brian Smith’s beautifully simple set is a rocking chair that also takes on roles as cradle and prison. Nina Okens’ costumes capture each of the decades the Albertines represent as well as their status perfectly. The principal innovation is Benoît Brunet-Poirier’s lighting design with illuminates the set almost exclusively through the use if individual bare lightbulbs. This brilliant concept reflects the truth of the play. Just as many individual moments make up a life, many individual lightbulbs create a single level of light. To emphasize the separateness of the lighting sources, Brunet-Poirier has individual bulbs turn on and off on a myriad of configurations. In one of the most haunting scenes in the play, only one bulb is burning just over the rocking chair at centre stage while the six women walk slowly around the dais speaking their lines as if performing a ritual while their shadows loom large on the paper screen behind the dais. This creates the impression both of our ancestors walking round the central hearth of a cave and of each Albertine as a shadow of a future self. In a heart-stopping moment, when Albertine at age 30 describes almost beating her daughter Thérèse to death Brunet-Poirier douses all the bulbs to plunge us, like the young Albertine, into pitch black.
Roy has drawn intensely committed performances from the entire cast. As Madeleine, Dufour effectively provides a sense of stability and optimism to contrast with extreme changes of mood of the five Albertines. Her most moving moment comes when she learns that she has died and tries stoically to come to terms with the fact.
Mélanie Beauchamp has so often played sweet, comic characters, it is a pleasure to see how she blooms in the complex role of Albertine at age 30, a young woman who has already had the horrifying experience of the rage she fears will blight her entire life. Her Albertine is the focus of the play’s ending, which I will not reveal, except to say it one of the most extraordinarily moving moments I have ever experienced at the TfT.
This is an innovative, profoundly insightful production of a Tremblay classic that simply must be seen by anyone who loves the theatre. It is a production that will change how we view this play from now on.
There are performance with English surtitles on April 19, 20, 24, 25, 26 and 27.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) The cast of Albertine en cinq temps; (bottom) Mélanie Beauchamp as “Albertine à 30 ans”. ©2013 Sylvain Sabatié.
For tickets, visit www.theatrefrancais.com.
2013-04-22
Albertine en cinq temps