Hurley, Erin

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

down, the audience falls quiet, and the stage lights come up onanother Pollock play” (380).ALEKSANDAR SAŠA DUNDJEROVIĆThe Theatricality of Robert Lepage.Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007,252pp. ERIN HURLEY In September 2008, Montreal playwright, actor, and director WajdiMouawad staged his solo show, Seuls, at the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui.The play centred around Harwan, a doctoral candidate at a mythi-cal Montreal university writing his dissertation on Robert Lepage.In one scene, to remind Lepage’s agent of precisely which doctoralcandidate writing on Robert Lepage he is, Harwan tells her he’swriting on “le cadre comme espace identitaire dans les solos deRobert Lepage.” This comic moment, recognized as such by theEspace Go audience, signals not only the widespread interest inLepage, his work, and his creative process by doctoral candidatesand other kinds of academics—an interest evidenced in, forinstance, the recent amply illustrated Ex Machina. Chantiers d’écri-ture scénique from L’Instant scène (2007) and Ludovic Fouquet’sRobert Lepage, l’horizon en images (2006). It also points to themany different ways such a multi-generic, multimedia, multi-linguistic body of work might be approached. Already Lepage’stheatrical productions have been examined through the lenses ofsociological and postcolonial critique, of semiotics, and of inter-medial performance in both French and English. AleksandarDundjerović, a director and senior lecturer at the University ofManchester, whose book is derived from his own doctoral disser-tation, takes a hagiographic approach. He attempts to isolate whathe calls the “theatricality” of Lepage’s work, a term which seems tomean “style” or “aesthetic” as tied to his creative process devel-oped from the Repère cycles. Its key features are a “transformativemise en scène,” its inclusion of multiple media, and its open-endedcreative process (25-6). He seems to attribute Lepage’s interna-tional success and cross-cultural communication to this openform (4). I say “seems” as Dundjerović describes the work andTRiC / RTaC • 31.1 (2010) • Reviews / Comptes rendus • pp 84-100 • 91makes observations, but does not offer sustained analysis of, normake any original claims about, Lepage’s work, except to say that itis important and good. This makes it a sometimes confusing and,to me anyway, unfulfilling read. Like the French-language publications immediately precedingthis one, Dundjerović illuminates Lepage’s creative process and hisartistic preoccupations. Most chapters use a particular productionas anchor for Dundjerović’s reflections on stages of Lepage’screative process; they admirably cover each of Lepage’s liveperformance genres (solo, collective, text-based, opera) and reachfrom his first school tours in the late 1970s to Zulu Time in the early2000s. Thus, La trilogie des dragons (1985-91) serves as an exem-plary use of “resources,” the first stage of the Repère cycles Lepagedeveloped out of his study and work with Jacques Lessard in theearly 1980s. Indicative of his hagiographic approach,Dundjerović’s first chapter establishes “Personal and CulturalContexts,” where a reductive view of Quebec’s cultural politics isestablished in order to position Lepage as exceptional to his envi-ronment. Subsequent chapters explore his style, solo performance,space and scores (another Repère term), performers, text, andfinally multimedia and new technology. However, The Theatricality of Robert Lepage suffers from acurious anti-intellectual streak that prevents serious engagementwith Lepage’s smart, intellectually compelling, visually stunning,wide-ranging oeuvre: in other words, a body of work that seems tocry out for substantive and informed discussion. Criticismsregarding his representation of ethnic and cultural others, forinstance, by the likes of Jen Harvie and Karen Fricker, are firstunderplayed and then responded to by a turn to Lepage’s “inten-tions” as the only counter-argument one might need. Dundjerovićwrites in summary of Lepage’s “theatricality” that “[Lepage’s]theatre directing is not about knowledge and an educated point ofview; it is rather intuitive, spontaneous, and founded on the actors’playfulness and group improvisations” (208). This kind of roman-ticization of artistic genius, a tack that Lepage has been known tocultivate himself, does little to advance knowledge about Lepage,his process, or his work as it straightjackets the critic/scholar.Moreover, it perpetuates a facile and self-defeating theory/prac-tice, scholar/artist divide. Dundjerović’s ideas are victim at once of over-generalizationand of a lack of facility with an abstract or conceptual critical (andaesthetic) vocabulary. On the one hand, clear and detailed descrip-tion of how Lepage takes a show from resources to scoring, for92 • TRiC / RTaC • 31.1 (2010) • Reviews / Comptes rendus • pp 84-100instance, or even of the shows themselves (what they look like,sound like, or are about) is largely absent. (The chapter on “ThePerformers” which takes The Seven Streams of the River Ota [1994-7] as its test-case captures most vividly the show itself, to mymind.) This strikes me as odd in a book vaunting Lepage’saesthetic and his original theatrical process. On the other hand, theconceptual vocabulary Dundjerović enlists functions as a place-holder for analysis. For example, he situates Lepage’s image-theatre in the realm of Baudrillardian simulation on page four butthen abandons that concept entirely. “Theatricality,” his key term,is “similar to the idea of performativity” on page 25, but is also likeBarthes’s concept of theatricality which, he says on page 35, means“theatre minus text.” Other heavyweights like Derrida and Žižek,as well as Lepage scholars like Harvie, Fricker, and Jane Koustas,are duly invoked but not engaged. The text itself suffers from repe-titions, unclear connections between paragraphs and sections,factual errors, and typos—most egregiously the French-languagetitle of Tectonic Plates (rendered Les plaque [sic] tectoniques) andnames of main characters of Seven Streams (“Hanako” becomes“Honako”) and La trilogie des dragons (“Wong” is rendered“Wang”). In the end, The Theatricality of Robert Lepage does not give usmuch information that we didn’t already have, even in Englishwhere the scholarly literature is somewhat less extensive than thatin French. We do need a good book on Lepage in English. I regretto say that this is not it.LOUISE FORSYTH, ed.Anthology of Quebec Women’s Plays in English TranslationVolume 1(1966-1986).Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 570pp.Anthology of Quebec Women’s Plays in English TranslationVolume II (1987-2003).Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2008. 380pp. LOUISE LADOUCEURC’est un travail colossal qu’accomplit Louise Forsyth dans les deuxvolumes de l’ouvrage Anthology of Quebec Women’s Plays inEnglish Translation. Publiée par Playwrights Canada Press, l’antho-TRiC / RTaC • 31.1 (2010) • Reviews / Comptes rendus • pp 84-100 • 93

Aleksandar Saša Dundjerović. The Theatricality of Robert Lepage.

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Aleksandar Saša Dundjerović. The Theatricality of Robert Lepage.

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