Robert Lepage

Robert Lepage (born December 12, 1957, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada) is a Canadian writer, director, designer, and actor known for his highly original stage and film productions, which often drew together disparate cultural references and unconventional media.

Early life and career

Lepage was raised in a working-class family in Quebec City. He graduated in 1978 from the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique du Québec (now Conservatoire de Musique et d’Art Dramatique du Québec). After studying in Paris with Swiss director Alain Knapp, Lepage in 1982 joined Théâtre Repère in Quebec. This theatre company, founded by Jacques Lessard, relied on the active involvement of actors to discover the key object or pattern necessary to develop the production. In 1985 Lepage became artistic director of the company. That same year he staged a one-man show, Vinci, about a young photographer coping with a friend’s suicide.

Lepage was noted for juxtaposing multicultural elements in his plays, often to surprising effect. His Dragon’s Trilogy (1985) was staged partly in Chinese. For Tectonic Plates (1988; filmed 1992), which dealt with the collision of French Canadian and Scottish cultures, he used two pianos gliding across the stage to symbolize the continents of Europe and North America. Lepage left Théâtre Repère to become head of the French theatre section of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 1989. There he staged Needles and Opium (1991), in which French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, both played by Lepage, exchanged places. Lepage envisioned the men in 1949 traveling between New York and Paris at the same time, both addicted to drugs. In 1992 Lepage sparked controversy at the British National Theatre by setting Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a mud bath.

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Ex Machina

Lepage returned to Quebec City in 1994 to found a new theatre company, Ex Machina, having left his position at the National Arts Centre the previous year. The company’s first production, The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994), used the bombing of Hiroshima as a metaphor for contemporary problems such as AIDS. The play, set in the home of a Jewish Czech photographer living in Japan, revealed the story line through a series of flashbacks. In 1997 the company moved into its new headquarters, Le Caserne Dalhousie. The building, a renovated firehouse, housed Lepage’s scenery production workshop and film studio in addition to a theatre.

Many of the plays staged by Ex Machina were written and directed by Lepage, sometimes in collaboration with other members of the company. La Géometrie des miracles (1998; The Geometry of Miracles) centred on the relationships between the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his acolytes. The abstracted Zulu Time (1999) put Lepage’s trademark facility with lighting and intricately composed video projections on full display to tell the stories of a cast of characters ranging from flight attendants to terrorists. A 2004 production, The Busker’s Opera, restyled John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) to feature a group of modern musicians. The Andersen Project (2005), in which Lepage also appeared, wove together several Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Always intrigued by straining the boundaries of convention, Lepage staged Lipsynch, a nine-hour production, in 2007, and Eonnogata, the story of cross-dressing spy Charles de Beaumont, in 2009.

Opera and film

While working in the theatre, Lepage also was involved with a number of opera productions. In 1993 he directed the Canadian Opera Company’s productions of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung. In 2005 at Covent Garden in London he staged 1984, an opera based on George Orwell’s novel, and in 2007 Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels.

Lepage also worked in film, first appearing in Jesus of Montreal (1988) as an actor playing Pontius Pilate in a Passion play. Le Confessional (1995), which Lepage wrote and directed, created parallels between the events surrounding the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1952) and the lives of his contemporary characters. Based on Lepage’s 1987 play, Le Polygraphe (1996) was a metaphysical detective story sparked by the murder of one of his friends. Possible Worlds (2000), based on a John Mighton play, plotted several permutations of the existence of one couple, played by Tilda Swinton and Tom McCamus. Lepage wrote and directed La Face cachée de la lune (2003; The Far Side of the Moon), which also featured him in the roles of the two main characters; it was based on his play of the same name (2000).

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Lepage applied his theatrical abilities to a multitude of other endeavours. He staged tours for British rock singer Peter Gabriel in 1993 and 2002 and, in 2005, premiered KÀ, a Cirque du Soleil production that he had designed, in Las Vegas. In 2008 he designed a massive light installation, The Image Mill, that projected scenes of Quebec’s history onto the side of a building in Quebec City.

Der Ring des Nibelungen and later work

Lepage later directed a production of Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City that featured a controversial 90,000-pound (40,823-kg) stage set made up of 24 pivoting planks on which images were projected and actors walked or dangled. Das Rheingold premiered in 2010, Die Walküre and Siegfried in 2011, and Götterdämmerung in 2012. The complete cycle began in the spring of 2012 and had a revival in 2013 and 2019.

In 2017 Lepage staged a one-person autobiographical play, 887, in New York City and Toronto. The following year he faced criticism regarding his casting of two productions. SLĀV, a performance inspired by traditional African American slave songs, featured Caucasian actors in the roles of slaves, and the resulting uproar resulted in the production being shuttered after two shows. Soon after, Lepage came under criticism for his forthcoming play Kanata because he neglected to cast indigenous Canadian actors in a work inspired by their suffering. He canceled the production after several producers pulled out of the project. Both controversies raised complicated debates regarding inclusion and cultural appropriation that remained unresolved when Lepage premiered a retooled version of the latter play in Paris at the end of 2018. The revised work, Kanata—Episode 1—The Controversy, received less attention than its predecessor, though it also excluded members of Canada’s indigenous population. Most critics panned the introduction of a subplot in which a nonindigenous artist is censored for painting indigenous subjects. Amid a contentious year, Lepage managed to stage a well-received production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

Legacy

For his contributions to the performing arts in Canada, Lepage received the National Arts Centre Award in 1994 and the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award in 2009, both of which are presented by the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation. He was also made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1994 and promoted to Companion in 2009. Lepage was later awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2013.