A landmark of Québec theatre, Albertine en cinq temps – L’opéra follows one woman at five stages of her life, as memory, identity, and emotion collide. This new operatic adaptation brings Michel Tremblay’s powerful work to the stage in an intimate and striking form. This production brings a defining work of Canadian theatre to the operatic stage.
Albertine en cinq temps – L’opéra is one of Québec’s most celebrated plays, written by Michel Tremblay in 1984. A landmark of Québécois theatre, the work centres on an ordinary working-class woman whose life unfolds across decades marked by social constraint, personal struggle, and emotional intensity.
The play is written in joual (a distinctly Québecois dialect of French) and is deeply rooted in the cultural and social shifts surrounding the Quiet Revolution, a period that reshaped Québec’s identity, religion, and family life. Tremblay’s work gives voice to women whose experiences were often overlooked, capturing both the intimacy of domestic life and the weight of broader societal change.
This new operatic adaptation, created by a collective of artists led by Nathalie Deschamps with music by Catherine Major, transforms Tremblay’s powerful text into a musical work for six singers and five musicians. It is the first opera written in joual, preserving the immediacy and emotional texture of the original while opening it to new expressive possibilities.
On her first night in a retirement home, Albertine, now 70, finds herself confronted by the many versions of her past. Five incarnations of herself, at ages 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70, appear together, each carrying the memories, frustrations, and desires of their time. As these voices overlap and collide, Albertine’s life unfolds in fragments: a young woman already filled with anger, a mother shaped by hardship, and an older woman reckoning with what remains. Across these stages, she grapples with love, resentment, identity, and the limits placed on her by family, class, and society.
Set against the shifting landscape of Québec before and after the Quiet Revolution, Albertine, en cinq temps is both deeply personal and broadly resonant. It asks what it means to live a life constrained by circumstance, and whether change, however hard-won, is ever enough.
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Albertine en cinq temps- L’opéra
Based on the play Albertine en cinq temps by Playwright MICHEL TREMBLAY
Composer CATHERINE MAJOR
Librettist COLLECTIF DE LA LUNE ROUGE
Stage Director NATHALIE DESCHAMPS