The Seven Streams of the River Ota (review)

I spent March 8, 2020, at London’s Lyttelton Theatre watching the remount of Robert Lepage/Ex Machina’s The Seven Streams of the River Ota, co-produced by the National. Like all theatre scholars, I love to see an old show made strange by its new context, and this one seemed to invite a revised perspective more than most. Lepage’s epic gained shape (and added four Streams) as it circuited international theatre festivals from Edinburgh in 1994 to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1996—in the same year and in the same city that my life as a compulsive theatregoer began. Between then and now, the global transit of such productions—and its reflection of less benign neoliberal circulations—has attracted critical attention,¹ and, especially since Lepage’s globe-spanning characters tend

Paul Hilton and Kyle Soller in The Inhertiance.

Photo: Matthew Murphy © 2020.

Sitting on a Man’s Head by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born.

© 2020 Ian Douglas. Courtesy Peter Born.

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina’s The Seven Streams of the River Ota. Photo: Elias Djemil. Courtesy the National Theatre.

Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne in Medea. Photo: Richard Termine. Courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.

to lack depth, his fealty to what Christie Carson once (approvingly) called “the liberal humanist ideal of a universal human nature” has met with warranted scrutiny.² Surely, I thought, the show’s universalizing maneuvers would now seem unseemly, especially its (once racially homogeneous) cast portraying people from across North America, Europe, and Asia. Surely, too, the show would now be shadowed by Lepage’s recent misfires: SLAV, “based on” Black slave songs, which closed after denunciations of cultural appropriation; Kanata, about Canada’s Indigenous populations, which limped forward after protests and got no further than an initial run in Paris. As The Seven Streams of the River Ota reprised its own famous footsteps, I felt certain that its repetition-with-a-difference would feel, in hindsight, especially different.

It did. Sent from Hiroshima to New York, Amsterdam, Terezin, Osaka, and Hong Kong, Lepage’s characters now seemed to me more clearly fated, less people than products of a sweeping plot and the tides of their director’s amazingly fluid scenography. Thus he advances his thesis, which is that global trauma washes away local differences. He also reveals the theatre as trauma’s recuperative double: moving people to tears as it moves them across cultures or from one cosmopolis to another. After three weeks of fine-tuning in London, the 2020 remount was itself destined for international travel to stops including a theatre festival in Moscow and the cultural Olympiad in Tokyo. If I had intended to write a review of the March 8 performance, in other words, it would have written itself. The only tricky part would be accounting for my own cultural tourism to see shows around the world, with an environmentally suspect frequency that no high-minded critique could ignore.

Stubbornly devoted to my theatregoing habits, I was one of the stragglers who stopped only when forced by public health authorities; even as I hand-washed obsessively and (another first) avoided pubs, I saw four more shows in the days after Seven Streams. But more than the others, it signifies differently for me after a year of isolation, anxiety, and sorrow. Now that over three million people—a gross underestimate—have succumbed to this novel virus, seven hours at the Lyttelton have remade themselves in my memory. Then I was too smart to be taken in; now I remember the show with love. Perhaps the pandemic has posed the sort of global menace that Lepage’s dramaturgy seeks somewhat clumsily in Hiroshima, in the camp at Terezin, in AIDS. Covid-19 hasn’t left us equally vulnerable, of course, but its reach seems universal even to...