Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
by Robert Lepage, Frédérike Bédard et al.,
directed by Robert Lepage
Ex Machina/Théâtre Sans Frontières, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
June 7-15, 2009
Robert Lepage’s epic multilingual drama Lipsynch is having its North American premiere in Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival. Audiences have the choice of seeing the nine-part play over the course of three evenings or in an all-day marathon lasting from 1pm-9:30pm including four intermissions and a 45-minute meal break. For devotees of Lepage and of experimental theatre this unquestionably a must-see event. Yet, even they will have to admit that the work pales in comparison to Lepage’s previous epic, The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994). The first four parts of Lipsynch are absolutely mind-blowing in their combination of ideas, drama and theatricality. Sadly, none of the following five parts reaches this extraordinarily high level, with only part 9 making a partial return to it.
Each of the nine parts is named for one of the drama’s nine central figures. The story begins with Ada (Rebecca Blankenship), an Austrian opera singer, who finds herself on a flight during which a teenaged Nicaraguan woman with a baby dies. In an improbable move crucial to the entire plot, Ada finds the baby (somehow not in foster care) and adopts him. We next move to Thomas (Hans Piesbergen), a German neurologist, now in a relationship with Ada, who is forced to tell a Quebecois jazz singer she has a brain tumour and faces a dangerous operation. The next focus is this singer, Marie (Frédéricke Bédard), as she conquers her temporary aphasia. Finally, we meet Jeremy (Rick Miller), now a filmmaker, who is shooting a film with a bickering international cast based on the life of his birth mother.
At this point the show veers badly into the banal. Part 5 about Sarah (Sarah Kemp), the caretaker of Ada’s aged speech therapist, tries one’s patience with its overuse of BBC news broadcasts. The coarsely comic Part 6 about the return of sound technician Sebastián (Carlos Belda) to Tenerife to bury his father is totally irrelevant. Part 7 about Jackson (John Cobb), a detective investigating the death of Sarah’s brother, is like a below-average British crime show. Part 8 about Michelle (Lise Castonguay), Marie’s schizophrenic sister, is dramatically potent in itself but still a detour from the central action. In Part 9, Lepage returns to form focussing on harrowing short life of Jeremy’s birth mother Lupe (Nurcia Garcia), but ultimately requires a deus ex machina in the form of a lesbian documentary filmmaker to patch up large plot holes.
Lepage claims that Lipsynch is a study of the human voice. The polyglot text, reference to aphasia, use of singing from opera to rap, multiple displays of recording, lipsyching, film dubbing and mime unite the nine parts. The show, however, is really about the capacity or even desire of the human brain to combine and mould the diverse particles of reality into a coherent picture. Lepage demonstrates this in the most breathtaking fashion in Part 2 where the set consists of what seem to be random bits and pieces which, when viewed by a video camera at the correct angle, create the projected optical illusion of a solid set. All the best stagecraft is linked to this idea. In Part 1 Jean Hazel’s brilliantly-conceived set modules combine and recombine in moments to form an airplane, a train and the London Tube. In Part 4 Lepage applies the method of filming Jeremy’s movie on breakaway sets to Jeremy’s off-set life so that we move into metatheatrical wonderland with a play about filming a movie about filming a movie. It’s not surprising that Lepage’s prodigious imagination should fail him for the inconsequential Parts 5-8.
The cast members, each having to act and sing in at least three languages are simply amazing, though Rick Miller really stands out for submerging himself so fully into his multiple roles. If Lipsynch does not fully succeed, at its best it features astonishing sequences like none you’ve ever seen before that expand what theatre can do and the means of expression it can use.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-06-08.
Photo: Lise Castonguay (centre) in Chapter 8 of Lipsynch. ©Éric Labbé.
2009-06-08
Lipsynch