by Marie Michaud and Robert Lepage
An Ex Machina and David Mirvish Presentation
at the Royal Alexandra Theatre
January 11-February 19, 2012

            The more I see of Robert Lepage’s multi-media shows, the more convinced I become that his dazzling visual sense cannot disguise his fundamentally thin content. The Blue Dragon is a 105-minute varnishing of an exceedingly mediocre story that is really soap opera sophisticated by Lepage’s expert practice of physical theatre adapted to global sensibilities. It begins with the sort of sensuous magic one comes to expect of Lepage but which, in this case, wastes its potential on a trite tale and characters who make little or no emotional connection with us because they are as deep as a graphic novel ink line and as complex as a comic strip. As Pierre Lemontagne (whose name is emblematic of something earthy and unyielding) draws the first blue Chinese ideogram on paper (magnified and mirrored by a video screen behind him), he makes various interesting connections between the ideogram and its possible symbolism, but these are hardly ever explored in any substantial way in the story, so that they, like the title itself, remain unfulfilled.

            The story involves three characters: Pierre, an expatriate Quebecker who runs an art gallery in Shanghai; Claire, his ex-wife who is rejected in her bid to adopt a Chinese baby because she is alcoholic; and Xiao-Ling, the beautiful young Chinese artist who is Pierre’s secret mistress and who bears his child. The characters reveal themselves too easily, and the Chinese socio-political and cultural background is as subtle as a coloured postcard because the information they impart about such things as Maoist influence on the arts, urban pollution, the one-child policy, culture shock, foreign capitalist influence, and massive industrialization that contaminates and stunts the quality of daily life is overly-familiar to anyone who has read tourist blogs, brochures, and Western propaganda. The trilingual text (Mandarin, French, and English), supplemented with English sur-titles, is a linguistic feat for the performers but, apart from this versatility, there is little to recommend in the banal dialogue, enlivened sporadically by humour and irony. Henri Chasse, who plays Pierre, has a sober solidity that lacks the sort of sensuousness that Lepage (who has played the role himself) requires in the role. Marie Michaud is warmer as Claire, but though she is a co-author, she has done herself little favour by writing what is at best a two-dimensional role. Tai Wei Foo as Xiao-Ling, the young artist-mistress, comes off best because she shows slightly more emotion than the others, and she is given two contrasting dances that she executes splendidly in exquisite lighting.

            The play begins like a film with a sequence of title and credits and unfolds at times like isolated film frames or cells of a graphic novel. However, despite this technical wizardry and the coded nature of many images (bicyclists against a Shanghai skyline; flash lighting; snowstorm; dragon tattoos and emblems), the story, characters, dialogue, and situations could go straight into television from where they seem to have come with their cliched burdens of an illicit affair, pregnancy, abortion, adoption, alcoholism, and culture shock. The authors contrive three variations for an ending, and this gesture seems to be more of a last-ditch attempt to make their soap-opera have the trendy veneer of post-modernism—but only a post-modernism that could be easily managed by an audience that confuses mass-cult gimmickry with narrative authority and substance.

photos: Erick Labbe

pic 1: Tai Wei Foo as Xiao-Ling

pic 2: Tai Wei Foo in The Blue Dragon



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