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The Blue Dragon, Barbican, London
Robert Lepage begins The Blue Dragon with a short talk on Chinese calligraphy, a single stroke materialising on a screen to illustrate his words. But from that simple line he develops a gorgeous piece of theatre rich with meaning, just as the calligrapher’s brush moves on to unite image, word and significance. As the piece unfolds, we realise that the words Lepage chooses to highlight – “river”, “mountain”, “woman” and “child” – run through the story, which weaves together east and west, personal and political, old and new. It is beautiful, meditative and wryly funny.
Lepage revisits Pierre Lamontagne, a character who featured in the French Canadian director’s 1985 epic, The Dragons’ Trilogy. At the end of that piece, Pierre, an artist, left to seek his fortune in China. In a sense, The Blue Dragon is Lepage checking back in with his creation to see how he is doing. Now Pierre no longer creates art: he runs a gallery in Shanghai. A quiet, middle-aged man (played by Lepage himself), Pierre is already conflicted – about China, about Canada and about the fact that the authorities want to demolish his apartment building to build a shiny new mall. But his life is about to get still more complicated. His old friend and lover (Marie Michaud) turns up looking to adopt a Chinese baby and becomes close pals with his current girlfriend (Tai Wei Foo), a young artist exhibiting at his gallery.
With this classic love triangle, Lepage creates a prism through which he looks at ageing, cultural confusion, fertility and creativity. He considers the way the past impacts on the present and some of the paradoxes of modern China. Sliding screens, a flexible set and juxtaposed images build up a multiplicity of places and meanings. Foo lends further perspective by performing dances that evoke both China’s ancient traditions and its communist history. But, in spite of this complex framework, the narrative itself is simple and moving, with Lepage, Michaud and Foo giving understated, yet vivid, performances. Sometimes the technicalities slow the action but this is a spellbinding piece about the choices we make and the cultural pressures on those choices – as pinpointed by the droll ending.
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