Created in 1984, Michel Tremblay’s play Albertine en cinq temps features a 70-year-old woman who, on her first night in her new retirement home, rehashes memories from the different stages of her life. At 30 years old, Albertine already suspects that the immensity of the sky will never be able to contain her rage towards life... 

 

The character of Albertine is the quintessential Quebec Catholic working class mother from before the Quiet Revolution. Half a century after the Grande Noirceur (the Great Darkness), women have acquired rights. Mothers and families have changed, religion has morphed, and culture has evolved. Despite all these developments, Albertine's rage remains. All things considered, do Albertine’s children really face possibilities and challenges so different from their mother’s ? 

 

With its story about a woman in search of freedom, struggling with her feelings and her relationship with a hostile and suffocating society that has always kept her in a cage, Albertine emerged as the obvious choice for the collective of women led by Nathalie Deschamps, director and producer. Albertine is the first opera in “joual” (French Québec dialect) . Six singers and five musicians give life to the bewitching music by Catherine Major on the libretto by the Collectif de la Lune Rouge. 

 

Because we are all Albertines. . .