Robert Lepage on the Toronto Stage: Language, Identity, Nation by Jane Koustas (review)

This short book is a compendium of responses in English Canada – and mainly Toronto – to visionary theatre artist Robert Lepage's work. It mainly traces the response in newspaper criticism and only up until a few years ago. Moving through the artist's work from about 1990 through to the early 2010s, Jane Koustas treats each major piece in succession within a rigid structural pattern: description of the genesis of the piece, its narrative and aesthetic elements, and a series of critical responses to it.

In its preliminaries, the book sets up Lepage as an artist who has uniquely positioned himself between English and French Canada, a relationship rooted in his bilingual upbringing in Quebec City. The setup promises to use Lepage's multiple identifications and cosmopolitan wanderings to explore more deeply the country's "two solitudes." The case studies, however, mainly concern themselves with implications for the artist's development and his relative "acceptance" outside of Quebec. And the book does not much "compare" reactions between French and English Canada; despite Koustas's facility in French (she is a professor of French at Brock University) and comparisons between Quebec and "rest of Canada," the focus is usually on English Canada, leaving the reader to consult other work for French responses, such as older books by Aleksandar Dundjerovic or Rémy Charest.

The book's argument seems to be that being accepted in Toronto was important to both Toronto's self-conception as a "global city" and perhaps even to Lepage's global visibility. This is not a new idea, although Koustas does fill out this story with more detail assembled in one spot than has been available before. Rather than persuade, the book seems to be mainly about accumulating a sense of Lepage's growing reputation outside of Quebec. The artist is celebrated as an intercultural auteur par excellence, with curiously little attempt to engage seriously with the ethics of intercultural encounter or the dynamics of cultural capital or status at work in either the circumstances of production, spectatorship, or reception. When theorists of intercultural encounter in theatre such as Ric Knowles or Patrick Lonergan are mentioned, it is mainly to buttress Lepage's reputation as importantly "global" rather than to pose any significant aesthetic or ethical challenge to the work or its reception.

Curious as well is the degree to which the book is uncritical about the nature of its primary data: newspaper criticism. In most cases, Koustas seems to survey the responses in the main papers (a small set of repeating voices) to determine whether a show was a "success" or not. The data is taken at face value, without considering the predilections of these idiosyncratic interpretive interlocutors, the horizon of expectation of the readers they write for, or how we might or might not value newspaper criticism in relation to other kinds of response, such as scholarly criticism or, indeed, other kinds of online commentary in the last decade. Given the withering state of newspaper theatre criticism in Canada (one frequently cited critic, Robert Cushman, lost his position at the National Post recently), according such authority to their judgments seemed under-justified in the text.

What is pleasant to read in the book is Koustas's passion for Lepage's work; indeed, Lepage's supposed "love affair" with Toronto feels like a projection of Koustas's own affection for his unquestionably impressive oeuvre. The book will likely be useful to an undergraduate reader or general Lepage enthusiast curious to learn more about the author's past productions. Lepage on the Toronto Stage, however, is neither a theoretical book nor a deep exploration of the mechanisms by which cultural identity is imagined and challenged in the forum of theatre in Canada or beyond. Perhaps Koustas's main contribution is to have expanded the platform upon which Lepage's international impact can be more thoroughly critically considered.