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The Globe and Mail
Trilogy revives brilliant ideas.
For the 10th edition of Montreal’s Festival de Théâtre des Amériques, the performers have jetted in from Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Britain, Belgium, Germany and Poland, but the centerpiece of the festival is a local phenomenon. It was in 1987 that the second edition of the biennial festival asked a hot young Quebec City director to mount his latest creation in Shed No. 9 in Montreal’s Old Port. The piece, which had been evolving from a work-in-progress since 1985, was La Trilogie des dragons (The Dragons’ Trilogy), the six-hour theatrical marathon that would launch the international career of Robert Lepage.
The famed director has returned again and again to the festival in the intervening years, and has now revived The Dragons’ Trilogy for the event, bravely submitting this almost-mythical work to the test of time as he hands it over to a new troupe of eight actors. This year, the venue is a cavernous railway repair shop in the industrial quarter of Pointe St-Charles; once again the playing area is a massive sandbox spread with fine grey gravel tales of love, losses and the lure of the Orient unfold across three generations and three cities, in French, English and Cantonese.
On this sandy set depicting a contemporary Quebec City parking lot, with an attendant’s booth at one end and a lamppost at the other, the new cast begins another artistic excavation of the old Chinatown that once stood on that site. The first part, The Green Dragon, takes place in 1930s Quebec City and begins innocently enough: Jeanne (Véronika Makdissi-Warren) and Françoise (Simone Chartrand) are two schoolgirls who play at shopkeeping, setting up lines of cardboard shoeboxes to recreate the businesses along Rue St. Joseph.
But in the adult world, things are darker, as the new English immigrant Crawford (Tony Guilfoyle) attempts to establish his own show shop but instead gets drawn into the world of opium and mahjong in the basement of a Chinese laundry. There, Jeanne’s drunken father, a barber (Jean Antoine Charest) will finally gamble away not only his shop but also his now-pregnant daughter to the laundryman’s son (Éric Leblanc).
The second part, The Red Dragon, follows Jeanne and her mentally handicapped daughter Stella (Sylvie Cantin) to 1940s Toronto where she now plays wife to Lee Wong and sales clerk in Crawford’s new shop. Against the backdrop of war, the familiar story of a Japanese dancer (Emily Shelton) impregnated by callous American officer is added to the mix.
The third part, The White Dragon, is set in Vancouver in the 1980s where Françoise visits her own son, the artist Pierre (Hugues Frenette). He will eventually fall in love with the Japanese dancer’s granddaughter, Yukali.
What is remarkable about the piece is its inventive and dreamlike staging. With the aid of some skillfully positioned interior lighting, that little kiosk not only conjures up the confined realms of parking-lot attendant and the giftshop clerk, but also the Chinese laundry’s front counter and its basement steps, as well as an X-ray booth. Under dim lights, the versatile cast plays a whole series of characters, both Asian and Caucasian, who are so visually different from each other it is often impossible to detect who is doubling which role.
In the scene that has remained the show’s iconic calling card, soldiers wearing ice skates wantonly march through the multiple pairs of shoes that Wong is desperately trying to tidy into families - one for daddy, one for mummy, one for baby - creating an image that summarizes both the sweeping destruction of history and the small domestic tragedy taking place in Jeanne’s household.
With the benefit of hindsight, many Lepage shows later, it’s easy enough to see the limits of this style. It is a theatre of coincidences rather than narrative, figures rather than characters and symbols rather than themes. Lepage has never cared much for psychological storytelling; indeed, the links between scenes and characters are so much a function of startling images rather than detailed relationships that the plots of this show and other Lepage creations have changed significantly through their multiple revivals.
Still, there are here only a few instances where these characteristics do not seem like virtues. In the awkward Vancouver courting of Pierre and Yukali, for example, the text collectively written by the original performers sounds painfully simplistic while the Japanese fertility symbol that accompanies their union looks ludicrously overblown. The Japanese story often feels like an afterthought.
But otherwise, this is a show that successfully floats emotions and ideas rather than pinning them down. If we understand little of Jeanne’s marriage - and no script would help here, since she and Wong would barely share a common language - we are left richly imagining its trials from her vividly conjured dreams of her daughter’s real father to the startling moment when the nun who will now care for the hospitalized young woman strips away her habit to turn into the handicapped Stella herself.
If Crawford’s passage into addiction is never explained and if the Vancouver screening of a documentary about Toronto’s geriatric junkies seems an outrageous device to bring him into the final act, then the grand image of his immolation on the flaming rickshaw that will return him to the Hong Long of his childhood completes some great circle of imperialism and the opium trade.
What is most revealing - and proof of this revival’s ultimate success - is that, almost 20 years after Lepage and his collaborators began creating The Dragons’ Trilogy, its theatrical ideas still feel brilliantly fresh.
