STYLE AND SPECTACLE
Robert Lepage’s Quills is sublime, François Girard’s Godot crisply absurd
Is the universe cruel or merely indifferent? Both options are available in two francophone productions currently in town.
First, there’s Robert Lepage, all tarted up in periwig, rouge, corset, silk kimono and modern suit — and for much of the time, nothing at all — as the Marquis de Sade. Lepage is starring in Quills, Doug Wright’s 1995 play ( subsequently filmed with Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet), and at first it’s a puzzle as to why he and his company, Ex Machina, are involved in what is, for all its graphic decadence, a fairly conventional American play. But once it begins, you can see how it affords great scope for the striking visuals for which Lepage is famous.
We’re in the asylum of Charenton where the aging de Sade has been imprisoned by the Napoleonic regime and where he enlists a young washerwoman ( MaryLee Picknell) to smuggle his outrageously lubricious stories to the outside world. Meanwhile, the asylum’s mean- spirited doctor ( Jean- Sébastien Ouellette) and its more enlightened young priest ( Jean- Pierre Cloutier) spar over how to “cure” their most famous inmate, with increasingly horrific results.
In Christian Fontaine’s design, the asylum is an endlessly shifting hall of mirrors and flashing neon, more like an upmarket lap- dancing club than a gothic asylum. It’s a visually astounding space, sometimes creating the illusion of multitudes with a six- strong cast. There are many other dazzling magician’s tricks, including scuttling severed hands and some acrobatic copulating on the Cross.
Lepage, who also co- directs with Cloutier, makes for a wonderfully charismatic De Sade, playing him like a sexy and mischievous alien fallen to earth.
If the engorged stylishness of the production, all underscored by portentous techno music, sometimes deflects from the play’s wicked sense of humour, it does elevate it to a sublime state that’s perhaps more than it deserves, or even asks for.
It’ll be interesting to see how it compares with Lepage in more familiarly personal mode when he brings his new show, 887, to Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in April.
If Vladimir, one of the existentially stranded tramps in Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, is poleaxed by the climactic revelations about his own and humanity’s predicament, the same surprise is unlikely to befall the audience. And not just because most of us are by now familiar with this modern masterpiece, a play in which, famously, “nothing happens, twice.”
In filmmaker François Girard’s atmospheric production, the jaw- dropping design created by François Séguin clues us in from the start that we’re in a Groundhog Day universe of ever- repeating absurdity. The celebrated wasteland- plus- a- bare- tree setting has been transformed into a Dalí- esque hourglass in which sand falls from an upside down
world, ready to be flipped over once Vladimir and Estragon’s pointless first- act day is done.
Though an inseparable double act, this Vladimir and Estragon are nicely mismatched. Alexis Martin’s Vladimir has a touch of the tragically decayed intellectual about him, while Benoît Brière’s Estragon, all finicky gestures and double takes, plays up the vaudevillian aspect Beckett
had in mind.
Pierre Lebeau’s Pozzo is suitably grandiloquent as the tinpot dictator who’s just passing through, but it’s Emmanuel Schwartz as Lucky, Pozzo’s mostly mute beast of burden, who really holds the attention. Quivering constantly in terror and fatigue and staring into the abyss of his wretched existence — and perhaps beyond — he brings a real sense of grotesque horror to the production. And comedy too, wrapping up his crazed gibbering monologue with a kind of verbal pratfall which instantly wins him a round of applause.
It’s a crisp, superbly performed production well worth hanging around for.