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The Blue Dragon at Belvedere College, Dublin
Back in the 1980s Robert Lepage made his British reputation with The Dragons Trilogy, three hugely imaginative plays about the lives, culture, memories and hankerings of Chinese immigrants in Canada. Now the Québécois auteur adds a coda, with the main character, an artist called Pierre, reappearing as an exile running a gallery in Shanghai. And the result is a three-hander that itself justifies a visit to the Dublin Theatre Festival.
If the play has a problem, it is that it’s not as centrally about China as we’re invited to think. True, it begins with a moment of traditional dancing, has something to say about the meaning of Chinese calligraphy, and counts among its back-projections not only photos of Shanghai but a TV ad in which a Confucian guru calms raging warriors with Kentucky Fried Chicken. But primarily Lepage is offering us a story that would need few adjustments to occur in Africa, South America, anywhere where Henri Chassé’s restless Pierre might try to settle and with his alcoholic ex-wife, Marie Michaud’s Clare, come in hopes of adopting a baby. Add Tai Wei Foo as Xiao Ling, a bold young artist and Pierre’s current and none-too-faithful lover, and you’ve a good old triangle drama. But it’s one that’s observed and acted so well that it seems as fresh as the flickering snow that, in one of many evocative scenes, accompanies a reconciliation.
Accompanies, but does not upstage. Lepage’s handling of slats, slits and other scenic possibilities is as clever and deft as ever — an airport effortlessly morphs into Pierre’s apartment, or a slick new bar, or a park through which characters cycle, or a grim railway station plus model train — yet never does it compromise the essential humanity of the story.
I mustn’t give too much away, though I can’t resist telling you that Xiao conceives and, surprisingly in China, keeps a baby whose needs soon leave her alienated, angry and making money by dashing off endless copies of Van Gogh’s self-portrait. But I can’t give too much away, for Lepage gives us three alternate endings, of which the last is the wittiest and maybe the truest. So, no, he hasn’t fulfilled the aim implicit in his programme note, to confront China’s “tremendous and terrifying power”. But he has produced a warm and absorbing play.
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