In Quebec, when a person is a dreamy type, they're said to be dans la lune - in the moon. One gets the impression that the celebrated Quebeçois theatre artist, Robert Lepage, spends a lot of his time dans la lune Yves Jacques's performance in Robert Lepage's 'the far side of the moon' wins over Karen Fricker
His productions are full of improbable connections and unexpected insights, the sort of ideas that emanate from a person who sees the world from a rather different perspective than most.
Lepage tends to put a character or two in each of his original productions who represent this unusual point of view. These characters, like their creator, are artists from Quebec with serious cases of wanderlust, whose desire for experience and self-knowledge takes them to all corners of the globe: Vancouver (The Dragon's Trilogy), Paris (Needles and Opium), Hiroshima (The Seven Streams of the River Ota).
Having perhaps exhausted terrestrial destinations, in his latest production, which comes to the Dublin Theatre Festival next week, Lepage takes his fascination with travel and artistic discovery to its logical conclusion - as its title, the far side of the moon, indicates. The show uses the Soviet-American space race as a metaphorical backdrop for a Quebec artist's battle to understand himself and to mend relations with his brother in the wake of their mother's death.
That character, Philippe, is a nerdy postgraduate student who has been toiling over a PhD thesis on the Soviet space programme for most of his adult life. He spends the majority of his time in his Quebec City apartment, fussing over his late mother's belongings; it is only when he decides to enter a daft TV competition to send a video message to outer space that we start to see his imagination bloom. In the course of the production, relations also start to warm up between Philippe and his younger brother, André, a flamboyant and successful weatherman whose simple world-view Philippe both mocks and envies.
Philippe then embraces the manifest destiny of all Lepage heroes, and takes to the skies: the means by which Lepage turns Philippe's metaphorical acceptance of travel into stage pictures is too beautiful to spoil by describing it here.
Lepage first created the far side of the moon three years ago, and it has been touring ever since; it is his most successful production since The Dragon's Trilogy, the multi-character epic that launched his international career in 1985 and toured for more than six years (it visited the Galway Arts Festival in 1989). Notably, far side has reinstated relations between Lepage and the British theatrical press, who it seemed would never forgive him after the disastrously under-rehearsed world premiere performance of The Seven Streams of the River Ota at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival, and the literally last-minute cancellation of the local première of Elsinore, his one-man riff on Hamlet, at the same festival two years later. But come the far side in 2001, and all was forgiven: "Lepage at his very best," said the Guardian; "heavenly" was the verdict of the Daily Mail, and the Observer found it "full of marvels" .
The production went on to win the Time Out Award and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year in 2001. Those raves were awarded to Lepage not only as writer, designer, and director of the production, but as its star as well: he originally performed far side himself. Since 2002, the doubtless daunting task of taking on the production's multiple roles - the lone actor plays Philippe, André, and several subsidiary parts - has belonged to Yves Jacques, an accomplished stage actor well-known in the Francophone world for his performances in the films of Claude Miller and Denys Arcand.
No better man: even this doubting Lepage groupie was quite bowled over by how fully and confidently Jacques has conquered the emotional and physical challenges of far side - the production is over two hours long without an interval, and the actor is seldom offstage and appears in 22 separate scenes.
Unlike Lepage, who performs the production at something of an ironic distance, Jacques immerses himself deeply in Philippe's emotional transformation. His performance is a striking balancing act: he at once pays homage to Lepage's originating performance, and still manages to make the production his own.
Jacques says part of what made him want to perform in far side was how closely he identified with the material: "It's a show I feel I can relate to. The idea of reconciliation with your family, with trying to understand life . . . in the production Philippe is jealous of André because \ has no curiosity and doesn't make himself miserable by torturing his consciousness about everything around him. I feel connected to that. Usually I am cast in the 'André' parts, as the people who are elegant and sort of know what they want. Philippe is all soul and ache and emotion - it's like he is my moon side, my poetic side, and I am happy to play that."
Lest Irish audiences be deprived of Jacques in elegant/confident mode, he will also grace our screens in Denys Arcand's stunning film, Les Invasions Barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), which recently won the Toronto Film Festival award for best Canadian film as well as two awards earlier this year at Cannes. The Barbarian Invasions plays at Cork Film Festival on October 15th and will have a broader Irish release in January.
When I met Jacques this summer, he was reaching the end of a sold-out seven-week run of far side in Montreal; while it might seem natural to an outsider that the production would be well-received in Quebec's largest and most artistically vibrant city, Jacques says its success there was far from preordained: "Robert has always said that the worst place in the world to play his work is Montreal; it's as if you are playing to an audience full of fathers and mothers. We are putting all these great quotations and awards from around the world on our posters, but people here want to judge for themselves. They don't want to hear it from anywhere else."
What Jacques doesn't mention is Lepage's ongoing, tortured relationship with Montreal - he hails from Quebec City, the provincial capital, and regards Montreal with classic chippy second-city disdain - which took a serious swerve towards the worse in 2001, when far side was first set to be performed there.
What became a Canada-wide debate about the responsibilities of successful artists to their home culture was sparked off when Lepage barred three major Montreal theatre critics from a press conference. When the critics in question put their ire at this affront into print, Lepage simply cancelled the press conference, saying that his productions were successful around the world and that he didn't need the Quebec media to help sell his shows.
This was viewed by many commentators as the arrogance of an international star who turns his back on the folks back home; a slew of indignant articles followed decrying Lepage's dismissal of the contributions that Quebec had made to his career, not the least of which are financial: Lepage's Quebec City-based not-for-profit production company, Ex Machina, is in receipt of significant funding from the national, provincial, and local governments.
"L'affaire Lepage", as it was dubbed in the press, eventually died down, but the issues that it brought to the surface remain thorny ones for Lepage, and resonate strongly with similar conflicts here in Ireland. When someone from a small, minority culture - particularly one that has had to battle for its identity against a colonial presence - becomes an international success, the home culture tends to respond with a complicated mixture of pride and begrudgery: we're all happy to acknowledge the successes of Irish artists around the world, but we're also quick to judge them as getting too big for their boots if they seem to be forgetting where they came from.
It's not just Lepage's touring schedule and the lists of co-producers on his productions thatare growing increasingly globalised. His early productions clearly referenced Quebec, and were greeted by local critics and scholars as vibrant evidence of a new generation of Quebeçois reaching beyond the province's borders towards a newly international definition of Quebeçois identity.
But in recent years the local references have started to slip away from his stage works; curiously, it seems to be that Lepage has made film his "local" medium. Three of his films - Le Confessional, Polygraph, and No - are in French and engage in Quebeçois cultural politics; the English-language Possible Worlds had a small art-house release last year. This year's Toronto Film Festival saw the world-première screening of Lepage's fifth screen effort, a film version of the French-language version of the far side of the moon, called la face cachée de la lune.
It is not giving up too much, one hopes, to say that far side ends with a homecoming; and it's hard not to see this as a reference to Lepage's own decision to base his very international career in his home province. Clearly that decision brings a set of problems with it, but it also seems clear that these tensions help keep Lepage's creative juices flowing. In order to keep his head where it belongs - dans la lune - he has planted his feet firmly on home ground.
the far side of the moon opens at O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, on Tuesday. Booking: 01-6778899. There is a post-show discussion with Yves Jacques on Saturday, October 4th. www.dublintheatrefestival.com