PROJECTS
Reviews
Robert Lepage work rewards theatregoers’ efforts
The Andersen Project
Robert Lepage, arguably the greatest artist working in the Canadian theatre, has always sought inspiration from those strange wayward fellow travellers on the path of creation whose concerns have dovetailed with his. Whether it’s architect Frank Lloyd Wright or jazz composer Miles Davis, Lepage has found a way to reach out and make his particular form of Quebecois iconoclasm match up with theirs.
Four years ago, he turned his focus to the life and works of the Danish fabulist Hans Christian Andersen. The resulting work, with its mixture of sexual confusion and personal guilt, caused great controversy in Andersen’s native Denmark when the play was first produced.
It finally appeared in Toronto on Thursday night, thanks to the adventurous programming of Matthew Jocelyn in his first season at Canadian Stage and we can now see what all the fuss was about.
As visually stunning as the work is, it will take even the most serious theatregoer a while to piece together its various fragmented stories. A Quebecois author is in Paris to prepare an Andersen story for the Paris Opera, but the director he’s supposed to be working with is in the grip of his own personal demons, driven by a compulsion to seek self-abuse in peep-shows.
There is a young immigrant man who resents having to clean up after the mess in these theatres, another friend back home who is struggling with drug addiction and a sad collection of unseen women suffering from their neurotic men. Oh yes, and there’s also a dog.
Believe it or not, it gradually all comes together, as we come to realize how complementary all these weaknesses are, in scenes that make a visual correlative by linking a row of phone booths with a row of peep show chambers, or by exquisite portraits of Parisian sculpture and architecture that offer a sad testimony to the sordidness of the lives within.
Yves Jacques plays all of the men with rare sensitivity, even though we come to realize they are mainly all just variations on the same theme. Still, it takes a real artist to offer us such subtlety.
You will be haunted by what you see and hear, and as with all of Lepage’s work, the final images that linger in your mind, such as a terminal holocaust that literally melts one of our major characters’ face beyond belief, will stay longer than any of the specific words.
The theme that gets expressed in the show’s last moments, that a Quebecois artist need not go to Europe or America to be recognized for his true worth, may seem a bit facile and obvious, even though Lepage cleverly links it back to Andersen’s own life.
The Andersen Project remains tantalizingly elusive, but it’s worth to least attempting to comprehend its mysteries and its treasures.
Store
