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The Blue Dragon
Robert Lepage is a global theatre maker and traveller, based in Quebec City but the darling of the international festival circuit with his own shows and frequently employed to make others for everyone from Cirque du Soleil and the Metropolitan Opera to the National Theatre. No wonder that in his own plays his characters spend so much time in airports and on aeroplanes, just as he himself must do.
The overriding themes of his work include the clash of cultures (and culture) that unites as well as separate us as human beings, the search for connections we all make and the coincidences that abound as we do so. In The Blue Dragon - a continuation of his epic Dragon’s Trilogy that he first made a quarter of a century ago - a domestic three-way is played out between Pierre (Lepage himself) a Canadian artist and art dealer, who has lived in China for the last 15 years, Claire (Marie Michaud), his former wife who visits as she seeks to adopt a baby, and his new Chinese protegee and partner, Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo).
But Lepage - co-writing with Michaud - expands outwards from this domestic canvas to paint a much broader picture of poetic patterns, both visual and philosophical. In the intricate layering of scenes and arresting images, the spectator is constantly taken by surprise. Lepage’s techniques - which include cinematic cross-cuts and different perspectives and stage pictures being revealed out of a constantly morphing unit set supported by video footage - are now familiar to those of us who know his work. They have been much imitated, but there is still no one who executes them with such compelling command.
These techniques are not an end in themselves but entirely in the service of superbly skilful storytelling, and Lepage the director is magnificently served, too, by his actors, including himself.
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