The Blue Dragon is a sequel of sorts to The Dragons' Trilogy, the six-hour family saga which almost 30 years ago marked Robert Lepage's emergence as a theatre-maker of international standing. But no prior knowledge is required to grasp what's at stake in this new two-hour piece.
Lepage himself plays Pierre Lamontagne, a French Canadian expatriate in Shanghai. His existence there is comfortable - yet menaced by the march of capitalism. Calligraphy is important to Pierre, and the blue dragon of the title is a calligraphic flourish symbolically linked with death and rebirth.
Those themes are crucial to the love triangle that develops when Pierre's boozy ex-wife Claire (Marie Michaud) arrives. She wants to adopt a child. Pierre accuses her of consumerism; she's simply looking for a cute performing doll to take home. Meanwhile, his current relationship with local photographer Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo) is developing in ways that are unsettling.
By Lepage's usual standards, The Blue Dragon is modestly conceived. Yet while there may be a cast of just three, the production involves many others offstage, and the scale of the technical achievement makes one think of the efforts more often poured into films.
The result is certainly cinematic. The performances are assured but it is the creation of visual magic - a mosaic of haunting images - that matters. The movement between scenes is fluid, and the sound design, by Jean-Sébastien Côté, proves particularly evocative.
Performed in French, English and Mandarin Chinese, The Blue Dragon looks stunning. It contains moments of beauty and also narrative ingenuity - the bravura conclusion being the best example.
No amount of gorgeous artifice can obscure the fact that at root this is a somewhat soapy drama about an estranged couple having a mid-life crisis (or two separate but overlapping crises).
For all its poignant touches, the story is a
flimsy web of contrivances. It doesn't truly illuminate China and Chinese culture, and its political comment feels muffled.
But the sensuousness, wit and imaginative opulence of Lepage's work are unmistakable. Even if not all its gestures come off, this is theatre that manages to be both densely poetic and a dazzling widescreen spectacle.
Until February 26 (020 7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk).
The Blue Dragon
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, Barbican, EC2Y 8DS
