Singular Life of Albert Nobbs

8/12/2019 Singular Life of Albert Nobbs

1/21

The Singular Life of

Albert Nobbs


2/21

London House- Lower Mortlake RoadRichmondSurrey TW LLUnited Kingdomwww.almaclassics.com

The Singular Life of Albert Nobbsfirst published in French in This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in

This edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in

Les ditions des Femmes, Translation John Calder (Publishers) Ltd,

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Typeset by Tetragon

: ----

All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre-sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made toascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should therehave been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy torectify the error in subsequent printings.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in

any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of thepublisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall notbe resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the expressprior consent of the publisher.


3/21

The Singular Life of

Albert Nobbs

Simone Benmussa

Adapted for the stage from

George Moores short story Albert Nobbs

Translated by Barbara Wright

ALMA CLASSICS


4/21

Introduction

The costumes in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs

have a role, just as the actors do. They do not merelyfunction as decoration or historical reconstitution,

they are more than that. They are an intrinsic part ofthe text, of the gestures, and even of the scenic writ-ing: they are the necessary point of departure for theexpression of the other themes. All the characters wear

professional clothes; even Mrs Baker is dressed as thebourgeois proprietress of a hotel. For the maids, forNobbs, as well as for the prostitute, their clothes rep-resent the force of work in society. Albert had pickedout an evening suit from a bundle of old clothes thather former master, Mr Congreve, had given her to sell.

Dressed in these evening clothes disguised as a man,Albert was able to get a job in a big restaurant as anextra waiter, and so be better paid. The beloved

masters suit becomes that of the manservant, hence it

fulfils various functions, according to whether there isa white apron over it or not. The ambiguity of Nobbss

situation is thus registered from the start. She wearsthe costume of the only person she could have loved,but she thereby puts herself in the position of never


5/21

being able to be loved by any man. Dressed thus, shebecomes the master of the maidservants, and so has a

place of authority in the hierarchy of the hotel workers,but she feels the marginality of her situation, becauseshe is the only person who knows that she has becomea perhapser. Her costume must be strict and plain,black and white. She is imprisoned in this costume,which is at the same time armour, yoke and defence.

Her costume has become her body. This was the start-ing point from which I directed the actresses. Nobbssshoes are important too: big mens shoes which anchor

her to the ground, give her weight. I had to exposethe scandal that a womans body hidden under thismans body represents for society. While it was only an

accident that Albert first wore this costume, in orderto get work, or in her own defence, there was a pos-sibility that the same costume might provide her withsomething other than work, might become her meansof subsistence and survival but would it do so? For at

the same time it exiled her for life from her own body.

In contrast, the costume of Hubert Page, herself awoman disguised as a man in order to be able to work,

is supple and loose: she wears a painters smock. There

is something free and informal about this costume.

Hubert Page is the mistress of her own actions; it wasshe who decided to work as a man: she had already

helped her husband in this way, she decided to leavehome, to join fortunes with another woman, she is ahouse-painter, has no place in any hierarchy, and is


6/21

happy. At the end of the play, though, in order not todie like Albert, suffocated by her secret, she goes back

home. In this play, costume is the pivot between lifeand death.

Albert Nobbs poses the problem of disguise, but

breaks with the theatrical tradition of travesty. Playson the theme of travesty are centred round revelation,unmasking, as in Shakespeare, for instance, or in Der

Rosenkavalier. There is always something temporary a plot, a strategy triumphed over by the person whoadopts the disguise, whereas in Albert Nobbs, it is herdestiny. Starting as her refuge from society, this disguise

becomes her prison, and then her grave. In the sameway, the money she accumulates to give herself security,

to bring her happiness, becomes her obsession. Shewraps it in pink or blue paper, she makes little packetsof it, she parcels up this body/money, she hides it under

the floor, which is the grave; she buries it as she buriesherself under her disguise.

This difference between travesty (a changed body)

and disguise (a hidden body) is of great importanceto the way the actress plays her part. Albert doesntfantasize. She has no fantasies about the inversion ofthe sexual roles. No: I see no sexual problems in Nobbs,

but a kind of pursuit of happiness, a kind of reverie,a very logical, systematic and deductive reverie. She

does her accounts. She has the simplicity to be able toadd up. What she is looking for is a house, for wantof a body. For her, the image of happiness lies in the


7/21

bourgeoisie in which she has served: this is the onlymodel she has.

When I was working on the adaptation of this shortstory, what I appreciated was the force, the simplicity,the obviousness, the incredibility of this true story

which, starting from a simple, naive news item, became

the expression of an extremely transgressive politicalsituation and this without being in any way didactic.

Through it, I saw the other themes we could bringout: discrimination, womens work, the situation ofthe perhapser, solitude, marginality, bastardy, the

adventure of marriage as a community of interests and

not as a sexual adventure which I found extremelymodern for those days and celibacy. In the course of

the adaptation, everything changes: one ransacks thetext, one creates ones own reverie, one follows the sub-

terranean layers of ones own imagination and of ones

own fantasies. One discovers different things. Whenarcheologists start their digs, under a Romanesque

basilica they may find a Greek or Roman temple, below

that a Punic temple, and so on. The different periodsare often superimposed, and contradictory. And though

I considered that Moore had told this story with a

great deal of respect, tenderness and humour, while Iwas working on it I realized that on the one hand hesaw things from the point of view of a man telling a

womans story (his humour was tinged with irony), andthat on the other hand he saw things from a writerspoint of view thats to say with the writers inevitable


8/21

distance from the characters who are the subject ofthe narrative, whereas on stage the characters are no

longer described: they are living. And as I becamemore deeply involved, I came to see things from anentirely personal and feminine viewpoint, which wastherefore nearer to this woman, Albert Nobbs, nearerto the everyday objects that surround her, nearer toher familiar decor. The tea tray Nobbs carries has the

importance of a word; the way the actress carries itis the equivalent of a phrase. The doors that move oftheir own accord carry on a dialogue with the actors,as do the lights, the movements of a dress, or the foldsof a coat. The images take form in this way, and create

a new kind of writing.

The theme of the play is Alberts transgression indressing as a man; she goes against the way in which

society is ordered. In the same way, the structure of

the play transgresses the established order of the thea-

tre it is as if the narrative were thwarted by the real

life of the characters. The continual play between the

distance implied by the narration, and on the otherhand the identification with the characters demanded

by the theatre, obliges this ubiquity to be both there

and elsewhere, and at the same time creates a conflict

which on the one hand shatters the habitual struc-

tures of the theatre, and on the other hand shatters

the traditional structures of the narrative form. In thisway a new rhythm is created which is the opposite of

the illustrative theatre, or of simple distancing. The


9/21

actor is playing on two levels, then: the acting must

be extremely real and simple (without ever becoming

realistic; in other words, deprived of all theatricality),but it must also contain moments of unreality, just as in

music, the scale of C is broken up by sharps and flats.

In the course of rehearsal, Moore became a character

like all the others; with his voice off, he is living hislife in the same way as the rest of them. The actresses

had to act with these voices and bring them to life, asif the unreal were a concrete part of everyday life which is a fact.

This unreality must be suggested. The stage speaks

very loudly and very rapidly; a stage image is imme-

diately striking, and as the audience cannot go back

and reread, as they could with a book, the slightestnuance must be visible. To succeed in conveying what

is merely suggested, we have to go very far, into the

farthest distance, into the most delicate, the most

secret recesses of the characters and of the space

that surrounds and penetrates them, which they in

their turn must haunt. For example, the movementsof the two maidservants round Nobbs and Helen

Dawes enabled us to convey Nobbss unspoken, inte-

rior impressions. Her feminine reality beneath her

mans clothes was displaced and taken over by their

continual presence. They were her feminine doubles.

From the moment when she puts aside her first sov-ereign for the purchase of a clock, and as we watch

the unfolding of her reverie about the possibility of


10/21

building happiness for herself which would mean

the rediscovery of her own being her feminine body

becomes materialized in the maidservants. The womanin her transpires, emerges, is represented behind

her, beside her, around her, as the maidservants, going

about their work, make feminine gestures. The woman

in her cannot emerge in the professional milieu she

is caught up in, in that Victorian paternalism which

alienates her, although she thought she was beingprotected. One more disguise.

Even Moore, a man who felt a certain tendernesstowards this story, displayed a kind of violence towards

Nobbs. Ought I to have conformed to the casting

that the story seemed to prescribe? A masculine-type

woman, ugly, gaunt, about fifty, with yellow teeth,etc.? Had I done so, I should have been conformingto the idea of the whole thing being comic, indecent,I should have fallen into the traps of plot and the

coup de thtre: Ah! Its a woman! In that case I

should have been humiliated; really it humiliated me

to think that Albert might have been called ugly andunlovable. I found it misogynous and trivializing thatpeople would be able to say: That sort of thing onlyhappens to ugly women. I preferred to put togethera young cast to embody, that is, the interior of thecharacters, to embody the force of the transgression;

it wasnt of the slightest importance whether Nobbswas beautiful or ugly. I preferred not to approach thequestion in the usual way, where, starting from their


11/21

appearance, actors express the inner life of charactersaccording to the theatres psychological laws. I chose

the opposite approach: starting from their interiorlife, to make their exterior body plausible. And herewe come back to the problem raised by Nobbs: thecostume makes the body believable. Neither Susannah

York nor Juliet Berto was physically Nobbs; they made

her plausible, though, by their acting, their costume,

and their feeling for the imaginary. This is why I couldnot, either, do what Moore did and show Albert as acorpse no, I just could not bring myself to do her that

violence. Albert is there, sitting on her chair, the chairthat has become far more than just her chair. It is herplace a place she has come to know by heart in all its

details: its consistency, colour, polish and scratches. Icould not take away her disguise when she was dead,as people take away a corpse from a house in orderto bury it: only her hands, which had been polishingshoes, remain suspended in mid-air.

Simone Benmussa


12/21

The Singular Life ofAlbert Nobbs

The Singular Life of Albert Nobbswas first performed in

this translation at the New End Theatre on June th, with the following cast:

Susannah York Julia Foster Stephanie Beacham

Nan Munro Veronica Duffy Maria Harper Fiona Reid Allen McLelland Dermot Crowley Kevin Moore

Directed and designed by Simone Benmussa

Produced by Buddy Dalton and Richard Jackson

La vie singulire dAlbert Nobbswas first performed by

the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault at the Thtre dOrsay,

Paris, November , directed by Simone Benmussa withJuliet Berto as Albert Nobbs


13/21

Prologue

The house lights go out.

: Good morning, Alec.

: Good morning, Your Honour.

: And what story are yougoing to tell me today, Alec? Will it be as strangeas the one about the hermit? Upon my word, there

is nothing like the bank of a river for storytelling.

: Tis true that they seem to come swirl-

ing up from the river bed.

: The old storytellers of

Mayo, your ancestors, always looked for inspiration

in running water. : But it is your turn today, Your Honour.

: So it is Well then, I shall

tell you a true story.

This takes place in the s, in Ireland.

The voice of a drunken old Irishman can be heard in

the distance, singing The Boys of the Column. It fades

away as begins his story.


14/21

Two chambermaids, dressed identically in black dresses

and long white aprons, gently pull back the curtains,

just as they would draw bedroom curtains in the morn-ing. They reveal the interior of a hotel: Morrisons

Hotel. In the half-light it is just possible to make out:

on one side, in the void, a swing door leading to the

kitchen: its upper part is glass, its lower part wood.

On the other side, equally isolated, a revolving wood-

and-glass door such as are to be found in old hotels:this is the front door. The two doors will later revolve

or swing of their own accord, the one opening on to

the world of the kitchen, the other on to that of the

clients, as if ghostly visitors or maids, fairies or voices,

were passing through them.

: When we went up to

Dublin in the Sixties, Alec, we always put up

at Morrisons, a big family hotel. I can still see

Morrisons: the front door opening into a shortpassage, with some half-dozen steps leading up

into the house, the glass doors of the coffee roomshowing through the dimness, and in front of thevisitor a big staircase running up to the second

landing. I remember long passages on the secondlanding, and halfway down these passages was thewell. I dont know if its right to speak of the wellof a staircase, but I used to think of it as a well. Avery big building was Morrisons Hotel, with pas-sages running hither and thither, and little flightsof stairs in all kinds of odd corners. I remember the


15/21

pair of windows, their lace curtains and their repcurtains; I can remember myself looking through

the pane, interested in the coal carts going by, thebell hitched onto the horses collar jangling all theway down the street, the coalman himself sittingwith his legs hanging over the shafts, looking upat the windows to see if he could spy out an order.

After the maids have attached the curtains to theirloops, they walk backstage, each keeping to her own

side. When they get to the doors they stop and look at

each other through the glass. The doors swing gently,

though no one has touched them.

The decor and the characters can just be made out on

the dimly lit stage.

A backcloth: the different doors of the rooms on the

upper floors, and the characters, taken from English

paintings of the Victorian era. These are guests, maids,

menservants, etc., painted in trompe loeil, some going

into the rooms, others carrying trays, maids leaningover the banisters looking down at the floor below,

shoes waiting to be cleaned outside the closed doors.

Some doors and windows can be opened to let the light

through. In the middle of the staircase, halfway up,

sitting on a chair but only just visible, a real character,

a waiter, his napkin over his shoulder, as if he were an

integral part of the centre of this backcloth, one of its

painted characters. This is .


16/21

The other characters are: , at her table,

bending over her account book, and ,

a house-painter, standing on a ladder.

A child is looking out of one of the windows back-

stage. He has his back turned; he shuts the window,

goes downstairs, crosses the stage and exits.

The lights come up.

The two ghost-maids are blinded by the light anddisappear, as if the brightness has dissolved them into

thin air.

The hotel comes to life.

The doors swing and revolve, carrying on a dialogue

with each other.

: Im telling you these things,

Alec, for the pleasure of looking back and nothing

else. I can see the sitting room and the waiter that

used to attend on us, I can see him too. And to thisday I can recall the frights he gave me when he came

behind me, awaking me from my dream of a coal-mans life. I used to be afraid to open the sitting-room door, for Id be sure to find him waiting onthe landing, his napkin thrown over his shoulder.I think I was afraid hed pick me up and kiss me.And yet all the guests liked Albert Nobbs. And theproprietress liked him as well she might for hewas the most dependable servant in the hotel: norunning round to public-houses and coming backwith the smell of whisky and tobacco upon him; no


17/21

rank pipe in his pocket; and above all, no playingthe fool with the maidservants. Holidays he never

asked for. A strange life his was, and mysterious. gets up from his chair and goes overto an open window next to the one where the child

had been. He leans out, just as the child had, and then

comes down. goes over to another window

downstage, stays there a moment, leaning out like the

child and . comes down

from his ladder and goes to put it and his brushes away.

He reappears and passes . They gazeat each other.

is standing in front of ,looking amazed. stops and glances from oneto the other, surprised, smiling, embarrassed.

is both perplexed and displeased. It is as if

they are frozen in their conversation a conversation

that has not yet taken place.

: Why mysterious?

: Because when he died, welearnt that Albert was a woman.

: A woman?

: Yes, a woman, and Hubert

Page too.

: I dont understand, Your Honour.

: You soon will. His willing-

ness to oblige was so notorious that Mrs Baker,the proprietress of Morrisons Hotel at the time,


18/21

could hardly believe she was listening to him when

he began to stumble from one excuse to another

for not sharing his bed with Hubert Page. You see,Alec, it was Punchestown week, and beds are asscarce in Dublin that week as diamonds are on theslopes of Croagh Patrick.

: But Your Honour you still haventtold me who Page was.

: Im just coming to him,Alec. Hubert Page was a house-painter, well known

and well liked by Mrs Baker. He came over everyseason, and so pleasant were his manners that oneforgot the smell of his paint.

: Good morning, Mr Page,

what a pleasure to see you back at the hotel!

: He went about his workwith a sort of lolling, idle gait that attracted andpleased the eye.

: I suppose you fully understand that Pageis leaving for Belfast by the morning train, and hascome over here to ask us for a bed, there not beingone at the hotel in which he is working, nor in allDublin.

: Albert Nobbs understood

well enough, but he began to mumble somethingabout being a very light sleeper.

: Now, what are you trying to say?


19/21

: He complained that hismattress was full of lumps.

: Your mattress full of lumps! Why, yourmattress was repicked and buttoned six months

ago. What kind of story are you telling me?

: That he had never sleptwith anybody before, and that Mr Page would get a

better stretch on one of the sofas in the coffee room. : A better stretch on the sofa in the coffee

room? I dont understand you, not a little bit.

: Page, for his part, said

that the night was a fine one, that he would keephimself warm with a sharp walk, and that his train

started early. : Youll do nothing of the kind, Page!

: Seeing that Mrs Baker was

now very angry, Albert thought it time to give in.Youll do nothing of the kind, Mr Page, he repeated.

: I should think not indeed! : But Im a light sleeper,

he said again.

: Weve heard that before, Albert! (Goingout) No inconvenience whatever, Page.

goes over to a panel on which a side-board and a pile of plates are painted in trompe loeil.She opens it. On the other side, her bedroom is painted.

She pulls out a folding bed and sets it up, helped by


20/21

. is so dog-tired that he tum-bles into bed, and a moment after is asleep.

stands listening, not yet undressed, his loosened tie

dangling. When his heavy breathing tells that is sound asleep, she approaches the bed stealthily.

Relieved, she gets into bed, though she hasnt dared to

undress completely. They sleep for a moment.

Suddenly awakes with a start. A fleahas bitten her, and out goes her leg. She is afraid that

this lively movement has awoken ,

but Hubert only turns over in the bed to sleep more

soundly. sits down cautiously on the bed, isreassured at seeing that is still asleep, and sets

herself to the task of catching the flea. She lowers hershirt until one of her shoulders is naked. With her back

to the audience, she starts scratching herself.

This scene must be played with the greatest modesty

and austerity, to enhance its innocence.

: Why, youre a woman!

: You wont tell on me and ruin a poor

man, will you, Mr Page? That is all I ask of you,and on my knees I beg it.


21/21

: Get up from your knees. And tell mehow long you have been playing this part?

: Ever since I was a girl. You wont tellon me, will you, Mr Page? You wouldnt prevent apoor woman from getting her living?

: Not likely; but Id like to hear how itall came about

: How I went out as a youth to getmy living?

: Yes, tell me the story; for though I was

very sleepy just now, the sleep has left my eyes andId like to hear it. But before you begin, tell me what

you were doing, wriggling about like that.

: It was a flea. I suffer terribly fromfleas, and you must have brought some in with

you, Mr Page. I shall be covered in blotches in themorning.

: Im sorry for that. But tell me howlong ago it was that you became a man? Before you

came to Dublin, of course? : Oh yes, long before

: Tell me

: It is very cold.

: Come, tell me.

Documents

Singular Life of Albert Nobbs