Past Perfect

Ian C. Nelson, Librarian Emeritus, former Assistant Director of
Libraries (University of Saskatchewan) and dramaturge (Festival de la
Dramaturgie des Prairies).

Like Manon, Sandra, and the Duchess of Langeais, Albertine (of Albertine
in Five Times) has become a Tremblay icon. Having laid out five decades
of her life (beginning at age 30) in the previous play, in Past Perfect
Tremblay offers an extended flashback to Albertine at age 20. Here she
confronts her mother and her siblings Йdouard and Madeleine one
evening, when Madeleine is expecting a visit from her beau, Alex. It is
an extended grouse session, with her mother countering Albertine’s
selfishness with her own struggles to maintain a sense of dignity amid
dire poverty and a family thrown into too-close quarters. Albertine,
dressed in Madeleine’s new frock, is bent on impressing and seducing
her former boyfriend, whose loss to her gentler sister at an earlier
time caused Albertine’s all-consuming nervous breakdown.

Past Perfect offers a rich—if repetitive—subtext to the first
Albertine play, but structurally it suffers as an overly long exposition
that begins to deliver the dramatic goods only in the last 25 pages
(when Albertine encounters and confronts her hapless ex-boyfriend). The
many elaborate verbal exchanges between characters only throw
Albertine’s intransigence into relief. In the end, one is left with an
overwhelming sense of being stifled by the overdramatization of her
self-styled “life of bad luck.” Йdouard calls her histrionic
exploitation of the cataclysmic event “another beautiful jewel in
[her] crown of thorns.” This piece lends itself more than any other of
Tremblay’s works to operatic treatment. It comes with total
egocentricity, for Tremblay even allows Albertine to throw derogatory
homophobic epithets at Йdouard—who, surprisingly, has no ready
comeback. By the end of the encounter, one understands why Alex made his
escape from Albertine. Audiences may well want their own exit. As a
play, Past Perfect seems rather like an extended footnote. Considerably
shortened, it might have proved more effective as an epilogue to
Albertine in Five Times.

Gaboriau’s translation effectively captures a singular voice: the one
we have come to associate with Tremblay’s mother as he has presented
her to us.