Reviewed by Claudia Perry
For all its brilliant technical wizardry, Robert Lepage’s one man show remains a simple story. It concerns a Canadian writer who is commissioned by the Paris Opera to write a libretto for Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Dryad”. Frederick, who has come to Paris to research and write this project, has a peripatetic and isolated existence much like that of Hans Christian Andersen himself. It is a performance tour de force for actor Yves Jacques who plays four characters: two of whom speak, Frederick and the Managing Director of the Paris Opera, and two of whom don’t – a Moroccan graffiti artist and the Dryad who is transformed into a woman in the fairy tale. Jacques’ character portrayals are funny, charming and subtle.
Frederick, a pop music lyricist, takes the Parisian gig because he wants to create something more lasting than the fare he has been selling for the past 16 years. He has broken up with his pop-singer girlfriend because she wants to settle down and have a child. They have been estranged for two months and from his swapped apartment which is situated over a Peep show house he makes phone calls to her in an effort to repair the rift. His friend, Didiet, (who has taken his apartment in Canada in order to go to a drug rehab program) has left him a dog to mind in his absence. The dog, it seems, is on heavy medication and in one scene we see Frederick at the dog’s psychologist office. Of course, the psychologist ends up analyzing Frederick. But Frederick has bigger problems. Firstly, the Director of the Paris Opera doesn’t even deign to read Frederick’s finished manuscript. Secondly, Didiet has apparently left an extremely pissed off drug dealer who threatens Frederick that if he doesn’t get his money he will burn the apartment building down.
Director Lepage has all kinds of special effects that have dazzling results executed by the production team of Ex Machina. The piece opens with the Moroccan graffiti artist spray painting the playbill onto a blank white screen making it look like movie credits. There are segments when Frederick is on a train and projections are used to make him appear to be speeding down the tracks. When on a whim he decides to take a dose of the dog’s Prozac, Frederick’s euphoria is heightened by a wild, laser light show. When the Director of the Paris Opera speaks in French, there are subtitles flashed along the bottom of the stage – just as in the opera. And we never actually see the dog that Frederick cares for, as it is on the end of a leash that floats and moves through the air.
The piece, for the most part is hip, European, and light with a strong emphasis on the comic. Unfortunately, the play is skewed so far to the comic, that I never felt the unhappiness nor the desperation of the leading character. And this lack of angst doesn’t help to lead us dramatically to the final tragic conclusion. If the author’s intention was to show us a man who has never grown up and doesn’t know what he wants until it’s too late – he has succeeded. But he still never puts enough emotional hooks into the audience for us to care what happens to this fellow. For even if we feel that ultimately, Frederick is a fool, we should still feel empathy or at least pity for him and his final end. Intellectually, it’s a marvelous exercise – a man who is adapting a Hans Christian Andersen story into an opera whose life mirrors Andersen’s own. But we need to feel the pain and terrible isolation that Andersen must have felt when he wrote stories where characters must always pay for their passions.