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by Robert Lepage, Sylvio Arriola, Carole Faisant, Nuria Garcia, Tony Guilfoyle, Martin Haberstroh, Sophie Martin & Roberto Mori, directed by Robert Lepage

Luminato, Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre, Toronto

June 13-17, 2012

“The universe is a game of cards”, Dick in Jeux de cartes 1: Pique

Robert Lepage’s latest production, Jeux de cartes 1: Pique (Playing Cards 1: Spades), commissioned by Luminato and ten other arts organizations and now having its North American premiere, feeds the suspicion that has been growing about the director that his interest in technological innovation in creating theatre is distracting him from the director’s basic duty of clarity in telling stories.  The Anderson Project, seen here in 2010 and Le Dragon bleu seen here in this year, were visually stunning but emotionally uninvolving and intellectually frustrating as narratives.  The same is true of Jeux de cartes 1: Pique, the first of a planned tetralogy inspired by the four suits of playing cards.  On the one hand, it may be unfair to judge a play as unsatisfying if it only the first of a series of four.  On the other hand, Shakespeare in his Second Tetralogy of history plays and Wagner in his four-opera Ring cycle managed to overcome this handicap.

Like Lepage’s nine-act Lipsynch, seen here in 2009, Jeux de cartes is co-written by Robert Lepage and the participants plus Carole Faisant.  One’s first reaction to Part 1 is the relief that, unlike Lipsynch, The Anderson Project and Le Dragon bleu, it is not a play about art.  We will have to see what transpires in the next three parts, but at least Lepage and company have managed to avoid a production that seems first about its own metatheatricality and only second about its characters.

The play is set in Las Vegas and its surrounding desert in 2003 when then President Bush declared war in Iraq.  Initially, we think the play will somehow link the Sin City of the US with the supposedly sinning city of Baghdad, but that ironic connection remains only in the background.  Instead the play presents us with several intriguing story-lines mostly set inside a large hotel and casino.  A Québécois husband and wife, Jeff (Sylvio Arriola) and Marie-Ève (Sophie Martin), have come to Las Vegas to get married because Jeff doesn’t want a church wedding back home, and Marie-Ève is already pregnant.  Mark (Tony Guilfoyle) is a mentally tormented British media representative and ex-gambling addict.  His past has led a particular creditor to pursue him and demand a payment now that will ruin him and that he cannot make.  Among the Latino hotel staff, the maid Juanita (Nuria Garcia) is training a new maid Conceptión (Roberto Mori), but tries to hide symptoms of an illness from her and the rest of the staff.  Meanwhile, a Danish soldier Holger (Martin Haberstroh) and a Spanish soldier Hernández (Roberto Mori) are training in Medina Wasi, a fake Iraqi village two hours from Las Vegas, for deployment with international forces in Iraq.  The two are gay and the ruthless Major (Tony Guilfoyle) who commands them seems to know it and plans to use it for emotional blackmail.                      

                

Two mysterious figures are at work one inside the hotel, one in the desert.  Dick (Roberto Mori), a Francophone who dresses like a cowboy but wears women’s underwear, seems to seek out people in the hotel whose lives he can destroy.  In the desert a shaman-like native man (Sylvio Arriola), or else a white man who has gone native, cares for all the flora and fauna in his territory, including the occasional human who comes his way in despair.   On the symbolic circular stage, the spirit of destruction seems to rule the centre while a spirit of healing reigns over the perimeter.

Each of these stories is intriguing on its own and they intersect in the course of the intermissionless three hours of the action helped along by employees of the hotel – a bellboy (Martin Haberstroh), a barman (Roberto Mori) and a prostitute (Nuria Garcia) – who interact with any characters in their vicinity.  Unlike Lipsynch, however, the stories don’t play off each other in a way that makes them build to a larger significance.  All the central figures – Jeff and Marie-Ève, Mark, Holger and Juanita – undergo a process of abasement or loss of whatever good image they had of themselves.  Juanita has the least distance to fall since as illegal immigrant she has conditioned herself to put up with habitual abuse. 

What all this has to do with “spades” is unclear.  Only one object like a “spade” appears in the action.  “Pique”, however, the name of the suit in French reveals various meanings.  It means the point of a lance and the verb “piquer” means to pierce.  “Pique” in English, according to the OED, is “A feeling of anger, resentment, or ill-will, resulting from slight or injury, esp. such as wounds to one’s pride or vanity”.  While the English “pique” seems too weak a word to describe the devastation the principal characters experience, it is true that the pride and vanity of all is cruelly pierced.  In the deck of cards, Dick and the shaman represent, perhaps, the two jokers.

None of the stories reach satisfactory conclusions.  What happens once the Québécois couple finds out they have betrayed each other?  Where did Holger ever get the money to pay the prostitute for her unusual services?  How could Mark pay reception from his red envelope of money in his briefcase and leave the hotel only to have the envelope reappear later in his vacant room?  And what happens after his experience in the desert?  We do not find out.

The play is presented in the round on a 10-meter circular stage raised 1.1 meters above the flat auditorium floor.  The actors all enter from and exit into this mechanical dais, making one wonder what life in the cramped space underneath with seven stage hands can possibly be like.  All scenery, too, rises from a myriad of trap doors that make up the entire surface of the stage or descends from the dome above the stage that houses four video screens and all the lighting and other equipment.  It’s all extremely ingenious and how set designer crammed so much into such a restricted space is amazing. 

In one memorable sequence the stage shifts from a desert scene in the simulated Iraq, to the hotel pool in the centre, to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting with lucite chairs around the perimeter, which also functions as a revolve.  In another, all the bad spirits that have inhabited Mark are expelled from him and rise up into the air in a vortex of smoke.  Bars complete with coloured bottles rise up in different locations, the surface can change into various gaming tables at the casino, the centre becomes different bedrooms in the hotel and four doors rise up from the surface to become entrances to those rooms.  While it is fascinating to watch Lepage’s latest toy machine in action, it must be admitted that much of the scene changing is technology for technology’s sake.  There is no need for doors to rise for each room when miming is just as easy, especially when one of the doors won’t cooperate. 

Indeed, Jeux de cartes seems to show that Lepage has forgotten how effective simple mime can be and how technology is not necessarily a better replacement.  The scene changes though rapid but are also quite noisy with all the traps opening and shutting.  While it’s impressive that the actors who all play multiple roles can make their numerous costume changes in the confines under the stage, it gave me a pang of claustrophobia whenever I saw one of them descend under the stage.  Other than Lepage’s aesthetic diktat that all must come from and return to the central stage, there is no dramatic reason why the actors could not make entrances to or exits from the stage as in any normal play. 

Viewed simply as a play, the first part of Jeux de cartes is unsatisfying.  Perhaps all will become clearer with subsequent instalments.  What really elevates the piece as theatre worth seeing is the heroic acting of the company, all of whom must play in different accents of various languages – whether British and American English, Parisian and Québécois French or Castilian and Mexican Spanish.  While I was more involved with the stories of Mark, Holger and Juanita, I was unhappy with the resolution of their stories.  Nevertheless, the acting of all six is convincing in itself without mentioning their effortless negotiation of the intricacies of Lepage’s mechanical stage.  Unfortunately, we will have to wait until Luminato 2015 to find out at last what role Spades plays in Lepage’s grandiose Jeux de cartes.             

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Martin Haberstroh as the Bellboy and Sophie Martin as a the Showgirl. ©2012 Érick Labbé

For tickets, visit www.luminato.com.