Robert Lepage's Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global by Karen Fricker (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Robert Lepage’s Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global by Karen Fricker
• Aleksandar Dundjerovic

ROBERT LEPAGE’S ORIGINAL STAGE PRODUCTIONS: MAKING THEATRE GLOBAL. By Karen Fricker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 272.

It has been twenty-seven years since Remy Charest’s book of interviews with Robert Lepage, Connecting Flights (1997), appeared in English translation. It marked the beginning of an organized exploration of Lepage’s creative practices, offering valuable insights into his unique approach to theatre. Lepage, a Canadian theatre and film director, actor, and playwright, has long been known for his aesthetically and culturally intriguing productions that emphasize collaboration between actors and audiences. Connecting Flights also addressed the emergence of global theatre, which gained momentum in the late 1980s and ’90s, largely due to the festival theatre culture.

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence of critical scholarship focusing on Lepage’s body of work, exploring topics like media, space, and global culture. These English-language books have centered on themes such as intercultural encounters (Carson, 2021), theatrical space creation (Reynolds, 2019), scenographic dramaturgy (Poll, 2018), identity and nation exploration (Koustas, 2016), and the language of a visual laboratory (Fouquet, 2014). Karen Fricker’s Robert Lepage’s Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global (2020) is part of this renewed interest in the artist’s work. Her focus is Lepage’s relationship with global culture and theatre audiences. Fricker examines the globalization of theatre and performance practice, drawing on theoretical and methodological approaches from cinema, affect, and queer studies. She argues that in the early and middle stages of Lepage’s development, making theatre was for a big international festival—it was theatre that related globally to the festival audience—and that globalization had a crucial impact on shaping Lepage’s theatricality. On the grounds of such contention, she places Lepage’s work within the context of a globalized cultural perspective, exploring the use of global theatre language of new technology and the dramaturgy of cinema and media.

The book is divided into seven chapters, spanning Lepage’s career and encompassing his earlier famous works from the 1980s and ’90s, such as The Dragons’ Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, Needles and Opium, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, as well as more recent productions such as The Andersen Project, The Blue Dragon, Lipsynch, and 887. Many of these productions have been on international tours for several years, captivating audiences worldwide. However, it is essential to recognize that the book’s relevance might have been different had it been published a decade or more earlier. Globalism has evolved from an intercultural fascination with the exchange of aesthetics and cultural interconnection to the domination of Western cultures over local traditions and homogenization. It is no longer seen as the favored expression of a plurality of distinct voices of global theatre, but rather as a glib term for the “Davos” festival audience who adhered to similar models of living and branded products, concepts that Lepage often satirizes in his performances with self-deprecating humor. Furthermore, Lepage has been relatively absent from the international festival circuit in recent years, and his productions are now of a different grand scale than his earlier works like The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Seven Streams of the River Ota.

While the book focuses on Lepage’s original work, as the title suggests, it needs to provide an adequate perspective to contextualize his early career within an historical context. For instance, Lepage’s characters often represent the West’s gaze on others, particularly in Asia, which remains unexamined. In offering a globalist interpretation of his productions, without historical framing, Fricker lands Lepage’s characters in a very Disneyfied and romanticized view of others, and she thereby misses a more developed critique that would reflect on thinking about diversity, decolonization, and representation of identities of non-Western characters in Lepage’s productions. Nonetheless, the book is not without a clear and current critique of the artist’s work. The last two chapters offer valuable insights into Lepage’s position within the context of neoliberalism and authorship (chapter 6) and examine his successful solo shows as a form of theatre that caters to a global...