Sydney Festival/Lipsynch
Lipsynch Theatre Royal 11-18 January, 2009; (02) 9266 4800 or www.ticketek.com
Long is the first word that pops up when this Sydney Festival is mentioned: in public perception this is the festival of the long show, apparently. By that most mean Lipsynch andrather than the time spent negotiating the online or phone ticket booking systems.
But how long is too long? There have been occasions when I’ve sat wriggling miserably through 75 minutes of noxious tosh wanting desperately to run from the auditorium shrieking “Give me my life back! You’ve stolen that hour!”
On the other hand, the approaching finales of the monumental Nicholas Nickleby, The Mahabharata and Cloudstreet (especially Cloudstreet) caused the slough of despond to open up and swallow me. The same with the Adelaide Ring Cycle – a stately week in the theatre and by the end, I wanted to do it all again more than anything in the world and sniffled pathetically as we drove away from the Festival Centre.
So, the duration (about 8.5 hours in total) of Lipsynch, Robert Lepage’s latest theatrical epic, isn’t the point. At least, it isn’t until you’ve experienced it, then you can mull it over and decide for yourself. Having done that it seems most likely that going into the theatre at 1pm, emerging at regular (four) intervals for a pee and whatever else you need, plus a 45 minute picnic break, before finally emerging blinking and bemused around 9.30pm, actually is too long but somehow it doesn’t really matter.
Lepage, another of Canada’s startlingly brilliant and iconoclastic artists, learned the rules of theatre thoroughly by going to the country’s premier drama college at the precocious age of 17 and graduating three years later as its youngest ever whizkid. He then began a further apprenticeship of acting, writing and directing until he finally threw away the rule book and began making it up as he went along. Other would-be wunderkinds need to take note of the first bit: he paid his dues and learned his craft inside out before he did the second bit.
Since then Lepage has been breaking and rewriting the rules to dazzling effect. Some with less success than others, but he’s never daunted. He keeps on keeping on, experimenting, exploring, pushing boundaries, exercising a seemingly limitlessless imagination and thirst for creativity. For that alone he deserves his stature as one of the great names of contemporary theatre.
In recent times, Sydney Festival has presented two Lepage works: The Andersen Project and The Far Side of the Moon, while Perth and Adelaide festivals hosted Seven Streams of the River Ota. The latter was epic in it proportions, the first two were more conventional – in length, that is. Lipsynch has recognisable Lepage elements (integrated technology and a playful way of intricately constructing and using the set and video cameras) while going further into the everyday aspects of contemporary human life with a series of linking characters and stories that are almost soap-like in the way they edge towards melodrama – with the wicked use of cliffhangers to end each episode.
Lepage and his company of actors and creatives habitually work from an opening premise then build on it, refine it, rethink it and revisit it as time goes on. In the scheme of things, therefore, Lipsynch probably has some way to go as it was first seen at the Barbican just last September with performances in New York, Madrid and France after that. What we have in Sydney is unlikely to be the show that will be seen elsewhere in a couple of years or so. Within the conventions of modern theatre, where deliberate change and growth (other than to fix things that are perceived to be “wrong”) is not the name of the game, that in itself is extraordinary and tantalising.
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Lepage’s game is to tease, to play, to continually ask questions and to persuade the audience to ask them too: what am I seeing? Is it what I think it is? If it’s not, does that matter? If it does matter, why does it? Lipsynch is about language, the human voice, love and relationships; and in an often overwhelming way, it’s about our unthinking relationship to and reliance on the human voice.
The show is divided into numbered “chapters”, each named for one character whose story features prominently in it. The first, titled Ada – who is an opera singer (Rebecca Blankenship) – is 55 minutes of the most dramatic, intense, unexpected, beautiful and tragic theatre I have ever seen, anywhere. Set on a trans-Atlantic jet, the audience is introduced to characters that will thread through the rest of the piece. In the following chapters/acts, others who are more or less intimately connected to them are introduced and they all, like pinballs, are flipped hither and yon by each other and circumstancesIn truth, the following acts never reach the intensity of the first, but it would be impossible to maintain and probably constitute an extreme health hazard too. As it is, after Ada’s story inexorably drags you in from the outside world, when “Interval” is announced, the audience files, shell-shocked and goggling, from the theatre and can hardly wait to get back to see what happens next.
What does happen is some of the most absorbing story-telling you’re ever likely to encounter. Opening with Ada singing (or lipsynching) Gorecki’s heart-rending 3rd Symphony, Lipsynch continues in an often meditative and musically constructed fashion; there is recitative, continuo, repetition, echoes (quite literally when Echo and Narcissus appear out of nowhere) and rather than building to a roaring finale, each section rises and falls until the final moments when the opening “bars” are inverted and repeated to close on a silent image of classic parent-child sadness that has such poignancy and power it’s almost unbearable.
Each member of an audience will go away with indelible memories. “Ada” is, as already said, 55 minutes I will never forget. Powerful in a different way is “Marie” (Frederike Bedard) whose version of April in Paris in a Soho club shortly after she has been told she has a brain tumour and will lose the power of speech, is spine-chilling. Later still, technology and lipsynching feature with wit and piteous courage as she improvises her way into vocal therapy.
In another dazzling use of technology and simplicity, Marie’s mentally ill sister, Michelle (Lise Castonguay), is seen struggling to come to terms with her life and love of books (she works in a small Quebec bookshop and runs poetry and literary evenings) as the set characteristically flips front and back to allow the audience to experience both points of view. Snow flakes shimmer in the dark night and become a clear evocation of her fragile mind in a beautiful and moving sequence.
There are sections that seem extraneous or laboured: an extended joke with a farting corpse could be one of those, on the other hand and in retrospect, it serves to bring you back in after an extended break. In the end, although all its parts aren’t equal and some are more fascinating than others, the whole is more compelling than any quibbles or ifs and buts. Lipsynch is an unforgettable and wondrous festival experience and I’m grateful to have been there.
On opening night the cast got a rare acknowledgement from a Sydney audience: a spontaneous standing ovation for four curtain calls. The actors clapped back – recognition perhaps of a shared experience and an amazing journey for us all.
