Adelaide Festival
The Dragon’s Trilogy
Theatre Repere de Quebec
Directed by Robert Lepage
Design and Couture : Jean-Francais and Gilles Dube
Music: Robert Caux
Thebarton Theatre .
March 1988.
Every now and then a production appears which is so imaginative that it makes everything else look like radio with mime. Such a play is Theatre Repere of Quebec’s The Dragon’s Trilogy, a Canadian work which was presented in the last week of the Adelaide Festival and inexplicably has been accorded a tepid reception from some reviewers and audiences.
The play spans 76 years and three cities, is performed in three languages and audaciously blends a quirky array of detail. Any description one might undertake would not sound promising. The play opens in a parking lot in Quebec City where the old Chinatown district used to be. Voices intone that we are embarking on a journey West while figures stand motionless in what looks like an illuminated tollbooth. This saga then traces the genealogies of William Crawford a shoe salesman, Mr Wong an old Chinese landlord, a drunken barber and his daughter Jeanne, and her friend Francoise. These connections criss-cross by coincidence and karma as events move to Toronto, Vancouver, the present and, with a kind of Doppler Effect, ricochet back to the past again.
It really is that cosmic. In fact in deference to the statistic that the Chinese population in Toronto is larger than the French-speaking one, the play is loaded with Eastern philosophy – the dragons in the title refer to the potential within each individual, forces of creativity but also dangerous energy if not resolved. If one were to dwell on the text delivered, often in triplicate – English, Quebecquois and Mandarin – it might sound like a three hour fortune cookie . Instead the splendidly orchestrated dramatics give The Dragon’s Trilogy an authority and power rare in any theatre.
Director Robert Lepage has been fearlessly filmic in his presentation. The narrative darts from one short scene to another; dialogue in French is easily construed by gesture, music and context- besides, the play itself is about the barriers and limits of language. Characters struggle to make themselves understood linguistically and emotionally. It can be comic as well. “A star is born?” Crawford asks Wong incredulously. “The store was burned” was the actual message. Neatly, like so very much in the play the images of fire,birth and constellations are prefigured and repeated in its poetic texture. The subject matter is almost alarmingly accidental – infrequent in the theatre but more common, and readily acceptable, in film. Lepage and his five associate authors prove that the imagination can make indelible metaphor with the most homely images.
The footsteps the characters follow are depicted by the use of shoes which reappear in the play with delightful invention. Shoeboxes pave the actors path, configurations of shoes indicate a marriage or a family. Wong’s son declares his commitment to Jeanne, pregnant to a soldier, by presenting her with a tiny pair of shoes. When she goes into labour he delivers the child with tender care and we are presented again symbolically with the pair of shoes. It is a beautiful image, superbly calculated.
Later in Act II, set in wartime, the soldiers on leave with their girlfriends begin to tramp the rectangular perimeter of the acting area in ice skates. The marching becomes more insistent, the younger Wong hastily rearranges pairs of shoes to keep them clear of the armies’ tread, he becomes more panicked and frantically tries to protect the little white shoes indicating the children in his family. Then, just as the hypnotic bowed string sounds of Caux’s synthesizer soundtrack reaches greater intensity the troops storm into the acting area brutally kicking shoes in all directions. The effect of such an image is indescribably affecting, many in the audience were on the verge of tears.
Such a response is not accidental. Lepage and the players had prepared for such an emotional peak with scrupulous care. Lepage and Theatre Repere have received well-merited acclaim for this production, distinctive not only for its theatrical invention but its warmth and humanity. Like the tiny lights in Pierre’s installation sculpture in Act III The Dragon’s Trilogy is not only illuminating but it twinkles with good humour.
“The Dragon’s Trilogy, Lowdown, Vol.10, No.2, April/May, 1988, p.78.