THE ANDERSEN PROJECT. To 18 February.
London
THE ANDERSEN PROJECT
by Robert Lepage with Peder Bjurman, Marie Gignac
Barbican Theatre To 18 February 2006
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat 11 Feb 2pm
Audio-described 11 Feb 2pm
Touch-Tour 11 Feb 1pm
Runs 2hr 10min No interval
TICKETS: 0845 120 7554
www.barbican.org.uk (reduced booking fee online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 January
One man and his technology in a tribute to the imagination.
If this one-man show is a typically oblique response by Robert Lepage and his Ex Machina theatre company to the Hans Andersen bicentenary, it’s never a dull one. From the opening where a white-haired figure (a bit like Godot’s Lucky) faces a projection of the Paris Opera’s multi-tiered splendour to explain (in that tried formula for an opening) about a cancelled performance, and the figure’s face is imaged large across the screen, the invention’s clear. Within a minute there’s added verve as Lepage seems to climb onto a vertical screen and spray-paint (to loud rock music) a portrait of Andersen, with rude bits added while filmic credits appear alongside.
For this is a fusion of Lepage and Andersen, outsiders both personally and culturally. That Paris cancellation is fused within a world where Montreal looks to the French capital as the centre of culture, finding in reality a workers’ solidarity that halts performances - as Andersen ventured south from Denmark, looking for validation among French writers for grown-ups.
There are hilarious set-pieces, like a vocal perpetuum mobile French cultural bureaucrat exposing the politics of co-productions, before stitching-up a Canadian writer hired to do the libretto for a children’s opera from Andersen’s story ‘The Dryad’. And images of urban loneliness, offsetting Lepage’s solo character (also contrasting elegant urban images such as the opera-house) with anonymous rows of empty peep-show or payphone booths.
This children’s opera, the show’s Andersen Project, is naturally a solo-piece, the story of a tree-bound figure seeking freedom but finding it only when the tree’s been transported to the city. Confirming the analogy, Lepage transforms from the composer into the equally lonely, silent Dryad.
His theatre is not that of the old actor challenging a cacophonous storm to drown his voice in King Lear. As a performer he typifies all Ex Machina acting, in a subdued manner, detached from overt emotion. Its triumph is to become part of the techno-display, while controlling it with an imagination ensuring the technical and digital wizardry, used with devastating originality and invention, serves the thematic point. The human remains Ex Machina’s deus.
Performer: Robert Lepage
Director: Robert Lepage
Sound: Jean-Sebastien Cote
Images: Jacques Collin, Veronique Couturier, David Leclerc
Costume: Catherine Higgins
Make-up: Nathalie Gagne
Puppeteer: Normand Poirier
Assistant director: Felix Dagenais
Associate designer: Jean Le Bourdais
Associate lighting: Nicolas Marois
2006-02-01 13:26:42