Sights and Sound of Quintessential Lepage

A jumbo jet flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Ada, an opera singer onboard, is captivated by another passenger’s baby. After the tragic death of the infant’s mother, Ada struggles through red tape and adopts the child.

A jazz club where the beautiful Marie is singing April in Paris. Thomas, Ada’s partner and Marie’s neurologist, drowns his sorrows, devastated by a hand tremor that could signify the end of his career.

A BBC Radio interview, during which Sarah, a respectable housekeeper, is revealed as a former prostitute. She makes a discovery of her own – that one of the radio station’s top announcers is her long-lost brother.

In America, Jeremy, Ada’s now adult adopted son, is making films. He creates a fictional account of his biological mother’s life and invites his warring cast to a restaurant where no one – because of language differences - understands anyone else.

Marie, the jazz singer, finds that her brain surgery has resulted in memory loss - she cannot recall the sound of her father’s voice. She hires actors to try and replicate it.

While investigating the death of a voiceover artist, Jackson, a Scotland Yard detective whose wife has just left him, is preoccupied with looking for a partner for the dance lessons he has already paid for.

Sebastian, the sound engineer on Jeremy’s film, returns to the Canary Islands for his father’s funeral. Yearning for a last message from his father, he is appalled when the corpse noisily releases jets of gas.

In a bookstore in a snowy Quebec winter, Michelle, Marie’s mentally ill sister, rebuilds her life. Refusing her sister’s offers of help, she turns to poetry to stave off her ghostly visions.

And finally, Lupe, a Nicaraguan girl lured to Germany and forced into the sex trade. After a brutal gang rape, she becomes pregnant with Jeremy, and plans her escape to America.

These are the nine different stories that come together in Ex Machina’s epic Lipsynch, which played at London’s Barbican Centre in mid September. The disparate chapters encapsulate the human race’s need to communicate; with sub-themes of memory and loss, loneliness and identity, confusion and pain – all woven together through an exploration of voice, speech and language. Robert Lepage reiterates his position as a path-breaking director by keeping the audience engaged through the show’s marathon running time (a Lepage trademark - nine hours in this instance).

Lepage conducts a multinational cast and crew in this ensemble-devised piece, characteristically drawing the best talent from around the world. With the play set in multiple locations – the cast similarly comes from across the continents. Each brings an authenticity – apparent in the individual idiosyncracies of the text improvised during the intensive rehearsal process. Rebecca Blankenship as Ada and Nuria Garcia in a variety of roles were particularly commendable for their moving portrayals of lost women among a generally adroit cast.

Ex Machina is widely known for its’ exceptional production values, mixing multi-media with traditional sets, awe-inducing spectacle with inspiring simplicity. In Lipsynch the innovation continues in powerful visual imagery that fittingly complements the chief character of this production – sound. Lepage restrains his characteristic visuals, allowing them to overpower the auditory stimuli in only a few instances, to emphasize the climax in each story. The fragmented projection of the piano in the smoky jazz club, the softly falling snow outside the bookstore in Quebec, the jumbo jet soaring against a stark blue sky all epitomize the emotion of the moment. The soundtrack itself consists of a range of music as diverse as the characters – ranging from Bacharach to Gorecki, Debussy to Iron Maiden and Schumann to Joy Division. And the human voice is underlined throughout – with the pure notes of the opera singer overriding the plaintive wailing of the baby, the incongruous wind of the dead father heard through the keening of relatives.

Lepage deftly uses juxtapositions in every element of his imaginative stagecraft to achieve new heights of innovation. The perfect graphs of highs and lows, the absurd humour against the pathos, the intimacy in a production of scale all mirror the blurring between the real and fictional worlds of the characters. The melodrama of the stories is mirrored in the operatic metaphor but played with restraint, creating a magical aura and consolidating Lepage’s position as the leading visionary of theatre today. While examining technology and its effect on human communication and relationships, Lepage achieves theatrical truth at its imaginative best.