The characters of the Québécois director Robert Lepage enjoy disturbing but revealing trips and encounters with the Other, the other side, the Stranger. During the many productions he has created in opera, cinema and theatre, only one of his characters has lived in permanent exile, Pierre Lamontagne, a character from The Dragons’ Trilogy. At the end of that six-hour piece, he went to study art in China. Twenty years later, Lamontagne returns, apparently now living in the center of Moganshan 50, a grouping of buildings in Shanghai housing the avant-garde of the plastic arts, where he has a gallery. He meets a stranger, Claire, a Montréal publicist attracted like others before her to business possibilities in China, but for reasons which have nothing to do with business – in another life she knew Pierre at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After their reunion and confrontation, their distant past allows each of them to open an unexpected door to the future.
Robert Lepage, who was awarded the prestigious Prix d’Europe du Théâtre 2007, performs this work along with his colleague Marie Michaud, co-author of The Dragons’ Trilogy, a work which bears his “mark,” simple, ingenious, extremely visual. As always, Lepage calls upon the theatre’s only inexhaustible resource: the intelligence of the spectator.
