Robert Lepage's multi-disciplinary memory play, 887, premiered earlier this year at the Toronto Pan Am Games. Now, thanks to the Edinburgh International Festival, European theatergoers have a chance to catch up with the Canadian actor/director's latest creative endeavour.
Like his other solo shows, The Far Side of the Moon, The Anderson Project and Needles and Opium, 887 is a one-man odyssey that combines his twin gifts for storytelling and visionary stagecraft.
887, explains Lepage in a program note, began as a play that was focused solely on his childhood memories of growing up in the 1970s in Quebec City. But then, as he worked on the script, he realized that he needed to expand its focus. “In came the working-class separatist movement of the 1960s, Michele Lalonde's angry poem “Speak White,” and my own experience of learning the poem's lines as an actor.”
Because Lepage heads his own company (Ex Machina) and is well-funded by the Quebec arts council, he is able to work for years on a project and to develop it in front of live audiences. He then canvasses these audiences for their response. “It's not that you have to do what pleases people,” he said. “The audiences stay around and let us know what they like, what they don't like and what they don't understand, and we feed from these ideas.”
887 opens with Lepage struggling to learn the lines of “Speak White,” a three-page poem he has been asked to recite at a political rally in Montreal. (“Speak White,” by the way, was code for “stop speaking French in this predominately Anglo-Saxon society.”) Lepage is stunned to learn he is unable to memorize the poem, for unknown psychological reasons. In his quest to become unblocked, he goes back in time to his youth, growing up in an apartment building at 887 Avenue Murray, a working-class district (Lepage's father was a cab driver).
Here is where Lepage's stagecraft comes into play: we not only see a four-foot-high replica of the building but all its inhabitants, each in their own flat. A toy cab (moving back and forth on cue), various sets (including Lepage's current home and office). Images of parks, streets and monuments flash in and out as well. Mixed with video images, snippets of sound and music, the overall effect is quite stunning, even miraculous. Memory is the theme of 887. How does it work, what are its underlying mechanisms? How does a personal memory resonate with the collective memory? These are just some of the questions Lepage attempts to answer. At the same time, he offers up an intimate portrait of himself: an actor struggling to come to grips not only with his text but with his place in life, in society. Lepage's pain and suffering becomes palpable during the course of 887; but thanks to his humour, honesty and compassion, we come away from this play feeling enlightened and transformed.
