Albertine in Five Times

David E. Kemp is a drama professor at Queen’s University and the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Albertine in Five Times is a fascinating and daring play by Michel Tremblay, Quebec’s best known playwright and author of Les Belles Soeurs, Forever Yours, Marie Lou, Hosanna, and Bonjour, la Bon jour.

Tremblay’s play presents the story of Albertine, one woman, at five different times in her life. Five different actresses present Albertine at 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70, and together they draw with clarity, strength, and compassion a portrait of this extraordinary but simple woman.

All the Albertines are seen on stage at the same time and they all comment and interact with each other in the development of this haunting and masterfully constructed picture of a single life.

Albentine at 30 has been sent to her sister’s country home after viciously beating her 11-year-old daughter. Albentine at 40, trapped in a claustrophobic house with her mother and her brood of troubled children, is on the verge of despair as she sees her life slipping away and yet is not able to communicate with anyone. She desperately wants out. Albentine at 50 is the rebel. She has renounced her past and established a new life, yet she too has regrets. Albertine at 60 has given up the struggle. She accepts her lot and makes it bearable by a liberal use of tranquilizers. Albertine at 70, my own panticular favourite, has achieved a kind of peace through moving into a home for the elderly. “Nothing will happen now…. Mind you, that’s just as well … an empty woman in front of an empty television set in an empty room that doesn’t smell good. Is that what you call a full life?” Even in seeming tranquility there is a rage against loneliness and waste. This woman will not go gentle into that good night.

But it is through the audacious and brave structure of this play that Michel Tremblay commands our respect and attention. The older Albertines warn the younger ones of what is to come: “We all depend on you,” Albertine at 70 says to Albertine at 30. By seemingly ignoring the unity of time and continuity and distilling a whole life span into a simultaneous experience, Michel Tremblay has produced, in my opinion, the most challenging and emotionally complex play that the Canadian theatre has seen in many years. If Michel Tremblay’s Albertine in Five Times is not the best Canadian play of the last decade it is unquestionably the most thought-provoking and brilliantly conceived.