Few living artists compare to Robert LePage when it comes to balancing sparkling, sizzling, soul-boggling technical virtuosity with profound emotional punch. The actor-director’s productions are usually heartbreaking multi-media installations that play with the isolation at the heart of human life. As Ian Shuttleworth put it back in 1991, ‘see Robert LePage and die’.
LePage hasn’t killed me, but he nearly broke up my relationship: when my date, now my fiancé, failed to weep at a performance of The Anderson Project in 2005, I did wonder if I’d just become involved with a man without a soul. Evidently, the relationship survived, but it was touch and go for a while.
Against such expectations, many fans will find themselves initially disappointed by The Blue Dragon, a low-key tale of Canadians in contemporary China. Gone are the haunting images of previous productions: instead of the fragile, magical puppetry of one-man shows like The Far Side of the Moon (2000), we have the corporate design of a team of 20 technicians, resulting in static, large scale sets and video panoramas that wouldn’t have looked out of place in last year’s Leonard Cohen concerts.
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