Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Robert Lepage
Ex Machina, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
October 21-30, 2010
As expected, Robert Lepage stages his The Andersen Project with extraordinary inventiveness. What’s missing is the the depth of feeling found in his other works like The Seven Streams of the River Ota or The Far Side of the Moon. Plot elements reflect each other and numerous related topics are raised but Lepage treats them superficially. He even resorts to explaining verbally at the play’s conclusion what it is supposed to mean, a concession to middle-brow taste he’s never made before.
Commissioned for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen in 2005, The Andersen Project sheds little light on Andersen or his works and is more concerned with the difficulties that beset international arts projects. It is primarily a comedy. Québécois songwriter Frédéric Lapointe (Yves Jacques in a virtuoso performance as all the characters) has accepted a commission from the Paris Opera to write the libretto for a children’s opera to be based on an Andersen tale. Rather than one of the author’s better-known works like “The Ugly Duckling” or “The Little Mermaid,” Fred is given the lesser-known story, “The Dryad,” about a female tree spirit willing to give up her life to visit Paris. Fred’s travails are intercut the problems of his porn-addicted project manager, glimpses of a Parisian graffiti artist at work, scenes from Andersen’s life and from a puppet staging of “The Dryad.” Since Andersen had no sex life apart from masturbation and since we see the project manager trying to wank off during a peepshow, Lepage comically portrays art as a kind of onanism with the public as eager voyeur--thus, unavoidably, including his own showmanship in the satire. He is less interested in the greater mystery of how Andersen transmuted his own deep unhappiness through art into so much happiness for others.
Lepage’s seamless blending of live action and video projection is stunning. In one amazing scene a Danish museum exhibit transforms into a high-speed German train and then into a disco. In another Fred walks behind a tree only to emerge as the Dryad on her fatal tour of Paris. It is this collection of such wonderfully imagined episodes more than any deeper thought or emotion that an audience will most remember. For those new to Lepage this may be excitement enough. For those who know what he can do when inspired by his subject, it will seem that he is suffering as much from commission fatigue as Fred. There’s a lot of dazzle but little light.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-10-22.
Photo: Yves Jacques. ©Emmanuel Valette.
2010-10-22
The Andersen Project