THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA

DOI Number: 10.1515/tco-2017-0029

Lepage and the New “Myth” of Technology

Călin CIOBOTARI

Abstract: Focusing on the famous Lepage’s Hamlet, seen in the National

Theatre Festival, Bucharest, 2017, I try to discuss a few things about what
appears to be a new “mythology” in making theatre: the myth of technology.

Key words: Hamlet, Robert Lepage, National Theatre Festival.

There are shows which refuse their chronicles. Their breadth induces
the critical act to search for new ways of describing, and analysing them. They
impose, to the ones who want to “recount them”, more of an essay tone than a
publicistic one. In the following pages, as a summary, I intend to tackle a few
subject matters about the unusual Hamlet of Robert Lepage, brought and
performed this year at the National Theatre Festival. Each of the following
sections is only a draft of ideas which doesn’t pretend to exhaust from the
interpretation point of view the subject it covers.

Theatre Reinvention and Technical Holiness

It is risky to search for the message of the show by means of
Shakespeare, wandering about what this Hamlet intends to communicate to
us. After all, there is nothing new in the reduction of the entire action of the
text to the inner world of a single character, turning into a monologue the entire
universe of the play. Robert Wilson, for example, had envisaged a somewhat
similar Hamlet, proposing the (re)cognition of the other characters by means
of a single one (1995).
Therefore, the message is not conveyed so much by the content of the
show, as by its form. What is staged becomes almost irrelevant; what truly
matters is how it is staged. Lepage seems to want to reinvent theatre, a huge


Lecture PhD at the Drama Departemnt, George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași

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ambition, equalled maybe only by Artaud’s insane plans. Everything has

evolved around us, technology is present in every moment of our lives. If the
theatre intends to go on mirroring the world, it must also reflect this evolution.
Apparently, Lepage’s revolution targets scenography only, which he
digitalises, transferring it to the borders of illusion and magic. It dematerializes
it by volatilizing the stage matter. Not completely, because the stage semi-
cube remains something real, just like the object instruments the actor, himself
real as well, uses. However, sufficiently so that the old perceptions of the
theatre stage may get panicked, menaced by new sensations, difficult to
classify, familiar and, yet strange visualising flows.
Besides scenography, the revolution that this show previews in an
almost pragmatic way, also focuses on deeper levels of the theatre. One of
them: the extreme scenic relation of the living body with the technology. Who
dominates whom in this relation? May technology itself become a character?
How does this cohabitation work and what type of emotions does it generate?
When he defined theatre as holy, Peter Brook was talking about the
people who still believe the stage was a place where the Invisible could be
made visible. Going beyond the metaphor implied in this statement, Lepage
seems to make it his, to its truly proper meaning: to make the Invisible visible,
yes, but using the great technological victories of the 21st century. There is in
this Hamlet a kind of technical holiness, a holiness which is not on the other
side of the world anymore, but on this side of it, of the things and creatures of
this world. They are our modern gods, cast in holograms, immaterial, but
visible, feeding the eyes with their spectacular and polychrome shapes.
Lepage’s message targets a violent meditation on the condition of the
theatrical aspect, and his show is one in which ‘the time is out of joint’ is
replaced by ‘the time of theatre is out of joint’. In this adventure, Lepage is
not alone: he takes the most important text of mankind and one of its great
actors to bear witnesses to him.

The Scenic Space and Its ‘Surroundings’

The scenic space in Lepage’s show is a semi-cube. The discussion
about the absence of the forth wall is thus related to a time which seems very

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long ago to us, a king of theatrical prehistory we almost think it does not
concern us anymore. From the cube where Hamlet’s worlds appear to us there
are missing three facets, which is enough for the open-closed ratio to be always
on edge. On each of the existing facets, more new worlds are born every
minute. You are invited to look at a great banquet of optical illusions. You are
proposed kaleidoscopic perspectives with conventional realities that are being
modelled here and now.
The semi-cube is revolving, which opens to the infinite the
manifestation possibilities of the illusion and proposes to force physical laws.
Closing and opening traps, furniture pieces appearing and disappearing, fake
three-dimensions, the verticality of a body which melts into its horizontality,
the permanent playing with the angle inclinations and changes – all that turn
the stage proposed by Lepage into a true magic box, and the audience into
children entirely involved into a newly launched game.
What is left of the great stage, the classic, the ‘real’ one, which,
nonetheless, Lepage’s cube is built on? The director, in a sequence not lacking
irony, shows us as a tomb. The only moment when Mironov leaves his cube
is the moment when he descends into Ophelia’s tomb, which is right here, on
the traditional stage. A trap is shut with a bang behind him, letting us know
the second option is impossible. Behind the cube-stage there is darkness.
Thick, impenetrable, almost translatable into void, but integrated into the show
when, under the starry sky, from the spectacular peaks of his cube, Hamlet
tells his monologue about “to be or not to be”.
It is a stage organisation as spectacular, as it is distanced from a
spectator abandoned just like before a plasma TV. The screen effect is actually
cultivated by Lepage: at the beginning of the show, projections of the cube
walls provide us, in a filmic manner, technical information: the show
producers, the distribution etc.

Acting and Virtuosity. Stanislavski in 3D

One of the major questions the show raises is related to the acting
possibilities in the technological universe. In other words: are Stanislavski’s
volumes still useful in this digitalized scenery where the actor’s psychology

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often has to face the psychology of the matter which decomposes and
recomposes like a kaleidoscope? Is there a sacrifice the actor has to make to
integrate in a landscape not as much as feelings, but of permanently changing
shapes? Beyond the unconditional procession of encomia dedicated to
Mironov, we have to note a certain hybridization of the actor’s performance.
There are, and not few of them, sequences when, no matter how far you are
from the stage, the breath of a great actor reaches you, as we are used to
traditionally define this term (especially as a psychologizing interpretation of
a character). However, in many others, acting is replaced by virtuosity, by the
ability to handle as fast and as precisely as possible objects, costumes,
accessories, to make the illusion possible, the new scenic ‘truth’ generated
now not only by the actor, but also by the entire conglomerate of lines,
projections, changes of levels, ignoring gravitation. Now and then, the artist
withdraws leaving instead a brilliant craftsman who, in his turn, is quickly
forgotten when the artist comes back again.
It is a show that can only by performed in larges theatre halls. In an
intimate space, the tricks would seem too numerous and too obvious. In an
intimate space, this Hamlet would lose its ‘truths’. The illusionists are afraid
of small spaces …

The Served Actor and the Hidden Actors

During the 140 de minutes, Evgeny Mironov is almost completely
alone. ‘Almost’ because, from time to time, Vladimir Malyugin joins him. But
actually, the cast is much larger: in the unseen side of the cube, underneath
and behind him, other servant-‘actors’ contribute to the creation of this scenic
illusion of loneliness. The partnership is not consumed on the stage anymore,
in sight, by means of the cue institution. Is the unseen team (they only appear
during the applause) a technical or an artistic team? Can we imagine them as
a collective secondary character or do those people remain in the zone of the
‘auxiliary character’ in relation to the stage? Hard to say! The fact is that
Mironov depends on them more than he would have depended in a classic
production of Hamlet. There are tens of moments when the immediate

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sequence of the scenes or the speed of getting into and getting out of the
character would not be possible without the team contribution.

The Director in the First Person?

Strangely, although the proposal of a new theatre is obvious, the
direction function remains the one from the traditional theatre. At least in this
show, Lepage returns to the classic responsibilities: reading and interpreting a
text, working with one or several actors, organising a world, the show world,
explicitly assumed. Even if, apparently, Lepage seems to give up the ‘theatre
in the first person’ (see the excellent essay Octavian Saiu has dedicated to the
great Canadian creator), in fact, by his directing omnipresence in the show, he
restates it, however in shades: not in the sense that it contains it entirely, but
as Craig meant it when he talked about the director, as an absolute master of a
world he disposes of at his discretion.
The director is, here, not only a practitioner, but also a theoretician. He
elaborates a concept and follows the scenic transposition of this concept. And
still, what is the novelty in Lepage’s Hamlet? The director’s claim to go
beyond the physical boundaries of theatre, his will to speed up everything,
projecting our theatrical present into a theatre of the future. Unlike Treplev,
the one who was longing for new theatrical forms, Lepage identifies their
possibilities, reproduces. In this light, the old director’s functions become
mere pretexts.

‘Resolutions’ on the Classic Text

The hypothesis of Hamlet’s insanity allows us, Lepage states, the
reading of Shakespeare’s play as a vast polyphonic monologue uttered by a
suffering man. The multiple personalities crossing him impersonate, in turn,
the characters in the text. We are proposed a temporary scenery of the 60’s, a
historical period the director believes to be appropriate to the explored themes.
In the monologue scene about to be or not to be, in Hamlet’s damped
room, a sink is placed on one of the walls. Hamlet starts his dialogue keeping
a blade above his veins and finishes it on top of the cube, looking at a starry

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sky which evokes Kant’s words about the ‘starry heavens above me and the
moral law within me’.
Yorick’s skull is an… archivable one. The computer tomography
image that contains it is placed by the character in a device which makes
visible a bright skull to us. The emotional effect of the entire scene is null. The
participation of the audience to the directing irony is instead, considerable.
The father’s spirit also shows at Lepage. Instead of the classic
equipment, it is now dressed in a white uniform, as a navy officer.
One of the most intense moments from a visual point of view is the
one when an Ophelia (not a very intelligent one) gives birth, she kills her baby
and disappears in the river whirlpool. We can see her first sliding into the
abyss, then we see, ‘from within’ the blue abyss that has swallowed her and
her body swinging in the depths. The cube turns into a sub-aquatic space.
Exploiting the eye metaphor which, in the classic text, is watching
(‘watched scene’), Lepage develops a vigorous spying theme, making
Polonius the first one responsible of it, a ridiculous character, with a gait of
caricaturised detective, provided with audio-video equipment, and an alarm
clock striking the hours when he has to take his medication; the clock, in fact,
will betray his presence in his murdering scene by Hamlet. Ironically, the
sound of an alarm clock will accompany, for quite a few seconds, his death.
The first contact between Hamlet and the actors is consumed before
the old-fashioned, black and white television, a false eulogy to the old-aged
television theatre. The protagonist will contact the troupe on the phone.
The duel scene has been solved using shadows. Lepage’s shadows
need to be discussed separately; they are bright, hologram doubles of the
human being, more than a shadow type, material representations of the soul.
The difference between Hamlet’s real level and the imaginary level,
the one the fantasmatic characters take shape from, has been frequently
emphasized by changes in the voices, slight alteration of some verbal
fragments.
The end, somehow hastened, shows us Hamlet in the hypostasis from
the beginning, wearing a straightjacket, facing the wall in Beckett’s manner
and reminding us the ‘rest is silence’.

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Convention and Theatricality

Beyond the entire outflow of technologies, a simple theatricality
crosses the show, usually appearing in the ‘poorest’ scenes from the
technological point of view: when Claudius and Hamlet talk to each other, at
dinner, when we are proposed to accept that the naked back of a man is
Ophelia’s body or when Polonius talks to us about the ‘Dutch men in Paris’.
And it is conventional even Lepage’s relation to Shakespeare’s text, which he
reorganises as a ‘collage’.

Emotion versus Sensation

Lepage’s Hamlet is, above all, a cold show. He doesn’t succeed or
doesn’t intend to activate the intense emotions that many spectators still search
in theatre/ theatres. The few snatches of emotion fugitively appear only when
Mironov performs pure acting. A very large range of sensations substitutes the
lack of emotion, the main recipient remaining the eye, the sight. Episodically,
your hearing is solicited, either by disparate sound fragments, or, several
times, some recognisable ones (familiar songs from the 60s-70s), or the
alterations of the voice I mentioned above, or surround sound techniques (as
in Claudius’ prayer, in which, suddenly, some words reach very close to our
years).

Are We Ready for Such a Thing?

The show does not seem important so much by the proposal it makes
to us concerning Hamlet, as by the ulterior speech it includes: the one about
theatre and its new forms. I think the question about how Lepage ‘reads’
Shakespeare’s text should be postponed in favour of another much more
urgent question: are we ready or not for such a show? There are interesting,
from this point of view, the audience’s reactions from the Large Hall of the
National Theatre in Bucharest, an audience mostly made of Romanian theatre
people or, anyway, very close to the theatre. Except for the collective coughing
attacks and the eternal ring tones, it seemed to me an undecided audience,
refusing an explicit take of stand and applauding, at the end, especially

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Mironov’s performance, which, perhaps, they considered familiar. ‘The show’

continued after getting out when about one thousand people, in smaller or
larger groups, were talking about what they had just seen, not bearing to take
their doubts home.
We shouldn’t keep silence on this unusual theatrical happening.
Lepage’s Hamlet is one of our generation, it is addressed directly to us asking
us to turn our eyes from the past and to listen to him. It is a show that needs to
be commented, debated. Not understood, accepted, but a discussion should be
raised about it.

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