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Play a thoughtful, gratifying experience
Blue Dragon full of meaning, visual splendour
Chinese calligraphy is a compellingly rich tool, as we discover at the beginning of The Blue Dragon, Quebec playwright/actor/director Robert Lepage’s newest show.
In a kind of prologue to the play—the Canadian English-language première just opened at the NAC, while the original French play, le Dragon bleu, ran here earlier this month—Pierre Lamontagne (an always-distinctive Lepage) kneels on the stage. Calligraphy brush in hand, speaking as deliberately as he does throughout the unhurried, often cerebral play, Pierre talks about each character he forms as it is replicated on a large screen behind him. Every simple brushstroke reveals a wealth of meaning, while a constellation of new meanings, from a tree with its roots sunk deep in the earth to a woman cradling her child, emerges with each additional stroke.
All of which pretty much summarizes The Blue Dragon, an Ex Machina production. At heart, it’s a simple, intimate story of three people in contemporary China. Yet it reverberates, if not always with the seamless elegance of calligraphy, with implications as complex and often mysterious as both the human heart and as modern-day China itself.
A sequel to Lepage’s 1985 epic play The Dragons’ Trilogy, The Blue Dragon picks up the story of Pierre, an ex-pat Québécois whom we last saw heading off to China. Now middle-aged and vaguely disappointed in life and himself, he’s running an art gallery in Shanghai and having an uncertain affair with the young, conflicted artist Xiao Ling (the lithely expressive Tai Wei Foo). Into their lives steps Claire, wry, funny and an old lover of Pierre’s who is as disillusioned by life as is he (Claire is strongly played by Marie Michaud, who co-wrote this show with Lepage). Now an advertising executive, Claire is in China to tap into the country’s booming economy. More importantly, Claire is there to redeem her unfulfilled, alcohol-numbed life by adopting a child.
On a more personal level, Pierre and Claire connect and fall apart. Xiao Ling unexpectedly winds up pregnant, forging a close bond with Claire in the process. Themes of identity, alienation, cultural heritage, art versus commerce—these and others swirl around the three characters as they connect and collide in both surprising and poignant fashion.
Finally, in an ending which offers three possible outcomes but feels contrived and even cute, hope resonates in the form of Xiao Ling’s child.
Directed by Lepage, The Blue Dragon is mounted on a two-tiered set (Michel Gauthier) that uses sliding screens to transform Pierre’s industrial loft into, variously, an airplane, a coldly impersonal train station, and a quite wonderful river and cityscape.
To this, Lepage, ever entranced by technology and multimedia, adds film clips, a very funny girls’ night out, and a spectacular flurry of projected colour splashes and then a snowstorm as Xiao Ling performs three dances representing traditional, Mao-era and contemporary China. Most of it works, but some is distracting.
Lepage, who will collect a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in May, directs The Blue Dragon. He enhances the largely naturalistic set and dialogue with stretches of silence, a generous move that gives us a chance to catch up with his quick-silver linking of disparate elements and layered meanings. And if the simple, compassionate story sometimes threatens to topple over from the accretions of meaning and visual splendour, at least we have time to catch our breath.
The Blue Dragon won’t be the Lepage benchmark that The Dragons’ Trilogy is, but it makes for a gratifying and thoughtful two hours.
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