Year Of The Dragon: Robert Lepage And The Dragon`s Trilogy

Being labelled a genius is a heavy burden. Canadian theatre and film director Robert LePage earned the accolade at age 27, with the first production of The Dragon's Trilogy. An epic piece of theatre which spans 75 years, seven time zones and three continents, it tells the story of two women desperate to escape the Chinese ghetto of 1920's Quebec. Presented by LePage's Ex Machina company, a revived production of the Dragon's Trilogy was recently presented at the Barbican as part of their 'Young Genius' season. Nuff said.

LePage is often described as a cross between British director Peter Brook and Merlin. Some examples: his National Theatre production of Midsummer Night's Dream was staged in a giant muddy pond. Another Shakespeare, Coriolan, was performed in a sort of cinemascope, with a large flat blocking half of stage, and the action viewed through a rectangular slit ("an insult to Shakespeare", sniffed Guardian critic Michael Billington). In Seven Streams of the River Ota, the past and present co-exist, as characters watch their lives flashback at them through a series of always moving mirrors. Over 20 years, Quebec born LePage has managed to forge a new theatrical language, creating hugely ambitious, multi-media projects which break down the barriers between word and image, screen and stage. His work manages to be distinctive, poetic, personal and also international. This year alone he's devised Ka, a new show for Cirque de Soleil. The cost? A piddling $165 million. More recently, he's directed an opera based on Orwell's 1984, completed a film version of his own Far Side of the Moon (about space exploration), and overseen the revival of Dragon. LePage - whose otherworldly appearance is the result of childhood alopecia - is also prepping a film version of Dragon. Genius, workaholic or both? The stage Dragon features an 8 strong international cast, including British actor Tony Guilfoyle (who some may remember as accident prone Larry Duff in TV comedy Father Ted). This marks the third time Guilfoyle has worked with LePage. Why does he keep coming back for more? "Because he's one of the most interesting theatre-makers on the planet", says Guilfoyle. "And he uses a very actor friendly process. We've all done a lot of work on the show so there's a great deal of ownership; the actors all write scenes or improvise. Everybody has helped create it."

LePage is surprisingly democratic in his methods. In a recent interview he explained his approach thus: 'I never say to anyone 'Do this, do that', it's simply not my style. Perhaps 'director' is the wrong word anyway because it implies a degree of power which I don't think I have. I think of myself more as what the French call a 'sourcier' - a water diviner.'

The Dragon's Trilogy begins and ends in a disused parking lot in Quebec City's Chinatown district, on the site of a Chinese laundry. It's here that Hong Kong born Englishman Crawford (Guilfoyle) opens a shoe shop, whilst simultaneously developing an opium addiction. Crawford starts young and powerful, builds a business but becomes more degenerate", explains Guilfoyle. "He's riddled with ambiguities. Really, he's a metaphor for the fall of colonialism. Several other stories run in parallel - the main one concerning the friendship between French-Canadian cousins Jeanne and Francoise. First encountered as 12 year old girls, we follow their lives through happiness and despair, childbirth, sickness and death. Ultimately, Dragon explores the fluctuating cultural identities of several nations, and does so with the compulsive grip of a soap opera.

Like all LePage's work, it is visually breathtaking: a pile of shoeboxes are laid out on the vast sandpit of the stage to become the buildings of Chinatown; later, hundreds of shoes are mutilated and the sand churned by uniformed figures in ice skates - a metaphor for the destruction of WW2. What makes Dragon so extraordinary is that these assorted technical marvels never threaten to overwhelm the essential humanity of the production. Guilfoyle: "We performed it in Croatia two years ago, not long after the end of the civil war. When the shoe scene happened, there was the aching silence, followed by a wave of weeping."

If you believe a lot of modern theatre to be mind numbingly tedious and irrelevant - and some of it is - The Dragon's Trilogy will correct your vision. This, despite it being 5 hours long. "It's not like watching some awful Shakespeare where you know in the first 5 minutes that you're going to be bored stiff", says Guilfoyle. "LePage has a skill for suspending time. There might be scenes that are filmic, or with dancing; a scene that overlaps with the previous one or is totally silent. It almost feels like it could go on forever - as if the audience has entered another world."