Metamorphosis of the Stage: Elsinore and The Ring by Robert Lepage

Abstract

Robert Lepage is one of the most acclaimed directors of contemporary theatre. His concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space (in Elsinore, Les Aiguilles et l’Opium, and The Ring), resembles Gordon Craig’s idea of using neutral, mobile, non-representational screens as a staging device. Lepage’s theatre is characterised by the scenographic machine, in the double meaning of actor and dispositive (that is, an agent effecting a disposition). Within this, involving video and a continuous metamorphosis of the scene, the actor is an essential mechanism. The scene integrates images and mechanisms of movement of the set in a single theatrical device in which man is still at the centre of the universe, as in the Renaissance; theatre, in a multimedia perspective, can thus revert to being a laboratory of integral culture, where art and technology rediscover their common etymology (tekne). I analyse two examples of his productions: Elsinore (1995) where a single actor impersonates all the characters of the tragedy, thanks to a metamorphic and mobile scenic solution and video projections, and The Ring cycle (2014–2016), where the set is a high-tech huge machine designed for the entire tetralogy, a work of mechanical engineering, rotating, bending and transforming into different shapes.