THE new production in the Druid Theatre, Galway, has been adapted, directed, designed and lit by Simone Benmussa, and the result is a rare harmony, a complete unity of execution flowing from a single vision of the whole. The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, from a short story, by George Moore, is a which looks at life through a narrow window, and echoes with the still, sad music of humanity.

We meet Albert Nobbs as a waiter in a Dublin hotel in the early part of this century. She" is a woman who was born in her own words a bastard, and assumes her male disguise early on to earn the better wages available to a man, and also to avoid sexual harassment, which she deeply fears. The years pass, and she becomes lodged in her role, and there is a price. She is effectively cut off from any human intimacy, a working automaton prized by her employer.

Then one day she has a chance encounter with another like herself a woman whose marriage has failed, and who now lives and dresses as an itinerant tradesman. Hubert Page has married again, but to and they are happiness, of a small shop with a congenial partner. She courts a predatory chambermaid, and is cruelly exploited. Her dreams disintegrate, and with them her survival instinct. She dies, and the brief return of Hubert Page ends the play with a resonant epilogue.

The director does not cast Albert as a masculine or androgynous figure. Jane Brennan has a delicacy of feature and a voice texture which are undisguisedly feminine, and this works for the character. The same is true of Clara Simpson's very female Hubert, sympathetically evoked.

The story is supported with some off stage narration by the original author, George Moore, and a male companion. It is another of the many felicitous touches with which Simone Benmussa and her inspired cast illuminate a life of quiet desperation, and make it relevant today.