Robert Lepage, the "theater wizard" from Quebec, Canada, brought his masterpiece "887" to Shanghai, which became the most popular work in Jing'an Drama Valley this year. The five performances sparked diverse discussions on Chinese social networks, from marveling at stage technology as "magic" to empathizing with the artist's "oral history", and there were voices questioning the male-centric narrative. The uneven arguments just prove that this work inspires the power of theater - theater is a playground and a magic house, where reality, history and memory are multi-layered and even more multi-semantic, and it spares no effort to resist the "only language" and "only voice".
The title of the play, 887, is the house number of the apartment building where Le Pageg lived when he was young, and the old house is reproduced in the center of the stage in an equally scaled appearance. Le Pagui went straight to the point and told the audience that he had been caught up in a whirlpool of memories because he had been invited to a poetry reading. In this matryoshka narrative framework, the elaborate stage installation becomes a rubik's cube of time and memory, Lepagei fiddles with props, dolls, and directs the lighting, and then three parallel timelines and three Lepagei appear on the stage: the most intuitive is the narrator Lepage, who shares the moment with the audience; the other is the childhood Lepage who appears in the form of dolls, silhouettes and videos in the "887 Prop Building"; And when this prop building is opened, a small living room in the style of realism appears, where the elderly artist is captured again and again by memories.
The "apartment building No. 887", which is about the same height as Le Pagui, is like a "dollhouse" for adults under the artist's dexterous arrangement. With dolls and props, light and shadow, Lepagee recreates the drama of the past in a miniature world – a hard-working father, a grandmother diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, neighbors with their own hearts, and Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle and Elizabeth II in this "world around me". The metaphor is evident that this is not only an encounter between the individual narrative and the big history, but that both can be equally "constructed" and even "reshaped" in the narrative. What is intriguing is the ambiguous dimensions that memories have. The fragments of the past retrieved from memory are always one size smaller in the scale of reality, Building 887 is shrunk, all kinds of characters and dolls are only the size of palms, and a long table is the entire long street; But these "board game" scenes that are smaller than life appear in the projection, and that is how they are preserved in memory, and the picture is always larger than reality and life. It's the trickery of history, it's the irony of the artist, all the ecstasy and fear are gone, and when these are reproduced in the narrative, it becomes a playhouse game of adulthood, like the impassioned de Gaulle, who is nothing more than a plastic doll in a suit pocket.
Lepagee is a magician who travels freely through time and space, a cardboard box, a bright light, a Chopin's nocturne, these seemingly ordinary theatrical elements become a medium connecting the past and the present, consciousness and reality. In this one-man show, he demonstrates that "drama" is first and foremost a naïve game, but he never indulges in naïve nostalgia, and the more "887" emphasizes the temperature of individual history, the more it challenges collective memory and public history.
Le Pagui's stage dictation is not a general autobiography, but a poem about "language" that touches his memory switch, "memory" is an onion that has been peeled off layer by layer, and "language" is the thorn in his heart. In his youth, French was seen in Quebec as the language of the low, vulgar, and lowly people, while English was the language of the upper class. His father fancied that de Gaulle could lead the "Liberty Front" in Quebec, but he also wanted his children to speak English; The English girl in the neighborhood got a job as a waitress in a teahouse because she could speak London, but this exacerbated her misery of living at No. 887; The boy living in a cheap apartment sings and dances every day imitating "Elvis...... The stories of Lepage's surroundings form a historical fugue belonging to the working class and the nameless, but this complex and painful polyphony is hardly played, and the "language" of these people is not heard, whether they speak French or English. At this time, the fluency of young Quebec French was seen as "the result of an elite education", and the intellectual class celebrated the "identity" gained from the French language. What a poignant metaphor for Lepagui's amnesia-stricken grandmother after her illness – collective, communal memory is like a brain with Alzheimer's disease.
The poem that Le Pagui refers to throughout the play is "Speaking the White Man" by the Quebec poetess Lalonde, which in the 1960s represented the identity of the local French-speaking community against the suppression of the French language by British administrators. At the end of 887, when Lepagui finally recites the poem, he is concerned with another, more insidious and ruthless repression, in which he has moved from the "lower city" to the "upper city" as his father wishes, and has mastered the "elegant" language, but his father and the laborer in general, are losing the "language". "Magic House 887" opens up for the last time on stage, driving up a late-night cab with Le Pagui posing as his father in the driver's seat, using his storytelling skills to challenge mono history and speak for his silent fathers.