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Tales of yearning and love have audiences wanting more
IT’S not often that you sit in a theatre for more than six hours and have the audience standing at the end and calling for more. Robert Lepage’s masterful production achieves this. Lipsynch is an elegantly staged series of stories that become increasingly entwined, leading in a circle back to a powerful conclusion that is full of warmth and humanity.
It opens with a silent scene on a plane in which a young woman dies, leaving her baby to be nursed by another woman. The stories unravel from there, following the consequences over several decades, and the lives of nine characters whose experiences ripple out from that event. The show returns at its end to reveal, starkly and shockingly, what led up to that fearfully poignant moment on the plane.
The tone is contemplative, although the narrative has great sudden leaps told with theatrical simplicity and power in a series of sudden revelations. Part of the pleasure is working out the puzzle as it unfolds.
The playing style is intimate. The action, often comic, is seen in frames, through walls or mediated by audio or video technology. It is as if we were voyeurs peering into the privacy of people whose lives contain secrets that will emerge only if we watch long enough. The effect concentrates our attention and is fascinating.
And always there is that use of media, ensuring that as the characters speak, are spoken for, or are translated (the production is performed, with surtitles, in English, German, French and Spanish) their underlying experiences and longings become more potently expressed.
A neurosurgeon operates on the brain tumour of a jazz singer who has to learn to speak again, although she can still sing. She later earns a living dubbing voices in films and then tries to dub a new voice for the dead father she sees only in her old silent home movies, because after her operation she cannot remember what he sounded like.
The crying baby on the plane, grown up and now a filmmaker, tries, with a lot of soap-opera hilarity, to make a movie that tells an idealised story of the birth-mother he never knew, unaware of the harsher reality of her life.
We realise that the movie he is making is the one the jazz singer has been dubbing. An ex-prostitute interviewed on radio, “branded on the tongue”, in John McGrath’s memorable phrase, by her heavy Manchester accent, discovers at the studio that her long-lost brother has become a plum-voiced BBC radio newsreader.
The terrible story of their youth together emerges nonetheless. She confronts him while he is recording a talking book version of Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus, in which Echo finally fades out of physical existence leaving nothing but a voice.
All these stories and more are told in a brilliant series of simple, direct scenes. The set and lighting design, by Jean Hazel and Etienne Boucher respectively, uses a splendid set of moving frames and boxes that become the plane, a train and a series of interior spaces. They are also the screens on which are projected the private and sometimes the public lives of the characters.
Lepage has often been called a theatrical wizard and while there is wizardry here, it is never gratuitous. He uses technology to reveal interior spaces: the jazz singer privately practising her singing, laying down tracks of sound without words while we watch computerised tracks of her voice; a videoed nightclub scene in which disjointed fragments of furniture only come together on screen, so that when the neurosurgeon has his crisis, he seems to be crashing through it all; and a wonderful entire act in which projected falling snow fills the stage as a woman with schizophrenia finds her peace.
The cast is magnificent. Rebecca Blankenship as the other woman on the plane, an opera singer who nurses the orphaned baby then adopts it and has a troubled relationship with him that is finally transformed in the redemptive conclusion; Rick Miller, as the baby grown to become a man who finally finds his mother; Hans Piesbergen as the troubled doctor; Frederike Bedard as the jazz singer; Lise Castonguay as the schizophrenic woman who is also, perhaps, redeemed; and Nuria Garcia as Lupe, the original dead young woman on the plane whose awful story is finally told in the last act. Equally good, as characters whose stories I haven’t even mentioned here but would like to have, are John Cobb, Carlos Belda and Sarah Kemp.
This is a beautiful, moving and absorbing production. People speak and sing, and translate, record, film and misunderstand each other. But what is underneath it all? It is a yearning for love.
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