Theater sans frontieres: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, and: The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies (review)

Two recent books on Canadian theatre will likely hold surprises for those readers unfamiliar with the (invariably) unexpected diversity and fractiousness of drama and theatre practice above the North American forty-ninth parallel.

Even casual students of contemporary theatre with little knowledge of Canadian activities in this area will be familiar with the reputation, if not the creations, of Robert Lepage. The phenomenal international success of the director's precise, highly physical, image-based theatre practice has earned him comparisons (indeed, within the first sentence of Theater sans frontiéres) with Ingmar Bergman, Peter Brook, and "Pete" Wilson. (I cannot but wonder if this is actually the first of several typographical errors in this collection; Robert Wilson would seem to be the more logical referent.) And as the brief foreword and introduction make explicit, one of the primary projects of this collection of essays is to document and investigate Lepage's pronounced public reception as "one of the most admired stage directors in the world" (ix). Intriguingly, both the strongest and the least effective contributions to the volume specifically address issues of popular and critical response, and the degree of attention paid to journalistic reviews accurately reflects the unusually intense commercial economy of Lepage's artistic production. At the center of each of these discussions of audience and media response is Lepage's utilization of the thematic and structural trope of universality—and the level of comfort with this strategy on the part of the various authors in the volume.

Thus, in describing Lepage's "alchemy of interaction between his actors and their audiences" (75), Christie Carson's thorough and detailed study of Lepage's "Intercultural Experiments" discovers that "Like the cultures they describe, his work [sic] can be full of contradictions, prejudices, and rash judgments based on insufficient information . . . [H]is work can appear to be as profound and complex or as shallow and trivial as the viewers or reviewers themselves allow" (44). Somewhat more critically, Jennifer Harvie, while appreciative of Lepage's many accomplishments, suggests that his plays (with specific reference to La Trilogie des dragons and The Seven Streams of the River Ota) "exhibit both constructive and restricting features of transnationalism. . . . They are also given to fantasizing about a universal culture, neglecting differences (of power, centrally) between cultures" (123-24).

Both Carson's and Harvie's arguments demonstrate admirable balance and objectivity in their assessments, placing them at considerable distance from some of the other attempts to navigate Lepage's critical reception. Michael Hood's first-hand account of the development of Lepage's The Geometry of Miracles, while providing welcome insights into the director's process and thematic influences, is weakened by unrestrained boosterism and unearned abstractions. And Guy Tessier's digest of "French Critical Response to the New Theater of Robert Lepage," while opening an intriguing window on a surprisingly foreign body of journalistic assessment, primarily provides a (presumably unintentional) case study in the ease of obscurity through inadequate translation and editing.

Other topics of exploration include the form and function of language in Lepage's theatre, and it is one of the real strengths of the volume that multiple, competing interpretations of this dynamic are presented. Jeanne Bovet, discussing the challenging multilingualism in the director's work, proposes that flawed "multilingual conversations . . . are progressively and successfully replaced by other non-verbal languages . . . which ultimately merge to allow not only communication but true communion between human beings in an altogether sensorial and spiritual process" (4). Yet, Jane Koustas suggests, the overt difficulty of the plays' multilingualism, rather than a deflection into pre- or nonverbal spirituality, intentionally "destabaliz[es] traditional notions of identity and translation...