I saw Robert LePage’s The Blue Dragon this evening at the SFU Experimental Theatre at the Woodward’s development. The show uses technology and digital media to take the play to astonishing places. The actors seamlessly interacted with the digital media projected onto the stage, at times painting the projections onto the set with brushes. I was impressed with how unobtrusively and organically the technology intersected with traditional theatre.
The two story set design was incredible, taking us from airport to river bank to starry sky to karaoke bar to loft apartment with a flash of lightening. They rode bikes while trains sped in the distance. It seemed like magic the way the actors disappeared off stage on one level, instantly walking onto stage on another level.
It is a shame that the story was as weak as it was because the potential was so big. The narrative glanced at issues of orientalism, colonialism, artistic integrity, capitalism, socialism and the victims of cultural advancement. But none of the characters or the struggles they faced spoke to me the way that the stagecraft did. The story was told from a distinctly male baby boomer perspective. Ageing white male gallery owner, Pierre Lamontaigne, lives in Shanghai, sleeping with a Chinese artist half his age and struggling to find his relevance and artistic integrity in a changing world. When his old flame appears on a quest to adopt a chinese baby – any baby really – his tenuous place in a foreign society crumbles around him. It called to mind Zadie Smith’s On Beauty or John Irving but without the passion or insight of either.
When Pierre’s young lover screams and cries and throws things around out of desperation and despair at her situation, the emotion was incongruent with the sterility of the rest of the play. I wanted to hear more about her struggle – bearing the child of a white man out of wedlock, making her way as an artist and a young single woman in a repressive Chinese society that is changing at light speed. It seemed to me that that would be a story worthy of the innovative, groundbreaking medium that Robert Lepage has crafted.
