Last night I attended Barbican's theatre hall to watch The Blue Dragon directed by Robert Lepage.
'The focus of the story, written by Marie Michaud and Lepage himself, is a fraught triangular relationship. Pierre Lamontagne, a conceptual artist in the trilogy, is now a Shanghai gallery owner who has fled what he sees as French-Canadian parochialism. He is visited by former wife Claire, who comes to China to try to adopt a child. And she finds herself befriending Xiao Ling, who is Pierre's mistress and pregnant with his child. How this is resolved is an intricate business in which we are offered a choice of three possible endings.'
Apart from Barbican's well known stage and light effects, the use of projection had a huge impact on the viewer, creating a spectacular visual effect of place and time. The scenery was strong enough to engage our attention all throughout the play with little disturbance by the slow moving plot. The integration of three languages together (English, French, Mandarin) with the erotic triangle and hidden messages about the prejudice of Chinese artists in their own country, was the successful formula for a great theatrical experience I will never forget.
