FOR the ever growing fraternity of George Moore devotees it may be only right and fitting that The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, Simone Benmussa's stage version of his short story, Albert Nobbs, has been performed all over the world since it premiered in Paris in 1977. But this little known story, set in Victorian Dublin, is now out of print and seems an unlikely source for an innovative French director and writer, who has adapted a series of cerebral, modernist texts by Helene Cixous, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Natalie Sarraute, and has written a playfully intertextual novel, Le Prince repete le Prince, based on a Kafka story.
Invited to Galway by Garry Hynes to direct and design the play for Druid Theatre, Benmussa talks about how moving it is for her to be "bringing Moore back home" to Ireland. It is a visit that she had planned for a number of years, and over a rushed sandwich between rehearsals she communicates her favourable impressions, in a mixture of French and English.
"Here, what is the most imaginative and creative seems the most normal, and not at all surprising. Here, I have found a sense of wonder that is being lost in other places."
Set in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs presents the true story of a dependable hotel waiter, who goes quietly about his business "no running around to public houses no pipe in his pocket and above all, no playing the fool with the maid servants" until his death reveals that he is, in fact, a woman.
"There are so many themes here," Benmussa says. "It is not a story of transvestism. It is about a change, a revolution, which happens absolutely naturally. There are social and political reasons Albert's poverty, the need to be paid like a man, not a woman. There is innocence, tenderness and naivete here, as well as courage. Albert has courage without being aware of it. It's all much sadder than I thought it was she confides to her friend, Hubert Page, and if I'd known how sad it was, I shouldn't have been able to live through it."
ALBERT lives in an indeterminate zone, as Hubert Page says "neither man nor woman, just a perhapser".
"Moore's attitude to her was misogynist and paternalist," Benmussa says, emphatically, "but she is imprisoned by the costume and by the role, and little by little she loses her identity. This is what interests me. She is sad and deep, and when she is found out at the end, she can't explain herself, she is dead. That image of her revealed body is very strong.
Benmussa's script has a fluid, dreamlike structure, blending past and present, with the recorded voices of offstage characters, the narrator, George Moore, and Albert Nobb's soliloquies all woven through the dialogue, which is punctuated by snatches of music hall songs. The set is animated by anonymous figures passing through the rotating doors, so that there is a constant, ghostly movement from the kitchen to the street, against an evocative trompe l'oeuil backdrop. Benmussa designs her own productions, to achieve a coherence between text, direction and mise en scene.
"Written dialogue is only one element in a play," she says. "We are not bound only to the text, but must use all the elements that constitute writing for the theatre. For me, to direct is to write on stage, using the voice, the design, costumes, movement, lighting. The set is like another actor."
Although this level of control over her material, as writer, director and designer, suggests a desire to indelibly print her own vision of the work on the cast, Benmussa talks about "harmonising our sensibility" in rehearsal and expiring the roles with each actor. "Fashions come and go. People talk about a director's theatre or an actor's theatre, but I don't think in terms of power or priority. It is like a dream how can you tell whether you are the dreamer or what you're dreaming about?"
HAVING studied literature at the Sorbonne, Benmussa came late to directing. In 1960 she was invited to join Jean Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud's influential Parisian theatre company as a writer. There she was encouraged by Eugene Ionesco, and "always wanted to write and direct". After conducting a workshop exploration of a piece based on Freud's case histories, written by the academic and critic Helene Cixous, she went on to collaborate with Natalie Sarrault, now, at 96, one of the last surviving nouveau roman writers. Benmussa deliberately sought non theatrical source material, "looking to find a dramaturgy elsewhere, in the novel and the short story, and to take a new approach to it.
I wanted to go deeper deeper even than the writer of the text into our exploration of the moment, our understanding of what happens between two people. You have to bring it alive, to do whatever is necessary to give it soul. And you know, it is much more enjoyable for an actor to work this way to live a situation and not merely represent it.
Her preoccupation with questions of personal liberty and identity has led her to the work of Cixous, Sarrault, Stein and Woolf but Benmussa is reluctant to be ghettoised as a "woman writer" or director. For her, feminism is about tangible social and political issues, such as the fact that there is no national theatre company in France run by a woman.
While she has her own company in Paris, she does not have a permanent base, which she finds frustrating. On the other hand, it leaves her free to work as a guest director abroad and to immerse herself in other places and periods, which is why her small, bemused figure could be spotted last month on O'Connell Street, Dublin, asking for directions to Sackville Street.
