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Reviews
Financial Times
Robert Lepage’s highly technical form of theatre can prove gratingly obscure, but not in The far side of the moon. This fine solo show from the Quebecois actor-director reveals Lepage at his best, using a combination of technical wizardry and emotional directness to create a beguiling meditation about human isolation. It’s graceful, witty and profound and packed full of eloquent stage image.
At the heart of the piece are two brothers, who find themselves at odds after their mother’s death. Andre is a vain, successful broadcaster, obsessed with worldly things; Philippe is an introspective failed scientist, obsessed with otherworldly things. Philippe’s particular passion is the Russian space programme and this allows Lepage to juxtapose their fraternal tension with the race in space between the USA and the USSR, and so to consider success, obscurity, rivalry and jealousy.
But this being Lepage, the show is also full of metaphysical reflection. He discerns a parallel between the cosmonaut’s search for the unknown in space and the artist’s attempt to chart the far side of the mind, and so the journey of the show moves both inward and outward at the same time. As Philippe grapples with his feelings after the loss of his mother, he enters a daft competition that involves making a video to beam into space in the hope of contacting extra-terrestrials. So his attempts to overcome his own loneliness become allied with that recurrent preoccupation as to whether we are alone in the universe.
This sounds rather arid, but in fact the show is often funny, full of wry humour and pleasing visual gags. Lepage, who plays all the parts himself, specializes in Bob Newhart-like one-sided dialogues, which, while they reinforce the theme of isolation, can also be very droll. And Lepage has a wonderful feel for the absurdity of life in the 21st century. Philippe begins his video with a guided tour of his apartment. Entering the living room, he reflects dolefully that it was once the place for companionship, but has now become the room where the television “tells stories and talks about the kind of day it had”.
In keeping with his oblique take on life, Lepage does not use conventional narrative to tackle his theme, but instead closes in on it through an accumulation of images that gradually build up resonance. So his show commences with Philippe sitting in a laundrette, washing his dead mother’s clothes. The humble business of washing clothes becomes a running theme, a constant reminder of the absence of the mother. Meanwhile the spherical window of the washing machine goes on to be the central image of the show, becoming a clock, a globe, a space hatch, a goldfish bowl, an aeroplane window, and many more. An ironing board, meanwhile, takes advantage of its rocket-like silhouette. Armed with these two props, Lepage is able to draw links between the story of space navigation of the new emotional territory of being orphaned.
Occasionally his playful style strays into whimsy, or he becomes obscure rather than enigmatic. But overall his combination of banal image and acquired significance lends the show great poignancy. And the final scene builds on all that has gone before. Using an old stage trick with mirrors, Lepage appears to rotate in the air. This solitary figure, spinning weightlessly, reminds us of the tumbling clothes in the first scene, of a baby in the womb, of a cosmonaut in space, and so seems to speak of the existential loneliness of modern man.
