NT : Go Backstage : Platform Papers : Robert Lepage
Robert Lepage
Robert Lepage in conversation with Richard Eyre10 January 1997, Lyttelton Theatre RE This is the fourth public conversation that Robert and I have had together, so we're a bit worried that we'll run out of things to say to one another. The last time we sat here was when Seven Streams was on last November. This was a piece about amongst other things, AIDS, Hiroshima and the Holocaust, so it didn't lack an ambitious subject. I think that with Elsinore you've chosen a piece which, if anything, has an even wider an all-inclusive series of subjects. RL I realise that for a British audience it must seem quite an ambitious project to take on exploring the themes of Hamlet. I thought that if one day I'm going to stage it properly, to do something with it that was as complete, complex and three-dimensional as it should be, maybe I should start exploring those themes. A lot has been left out, some things have been watered down, some have been cut, some completely refashioned and remodelled. So it's not really Hamlet. That's why I decided to call it Elsinore, because I was too chicken to call it Hamlet. I was trying to explore some of the themes of Hamlet, trying to see how, by juggling around with a group of technicians, musicians other people than my usual group of actors I could try to find a way of understanding how Hamlet is constructed, what it has to say, what are the different themes. What I decided was to piece together the bits that were performable by one person. No, not for one person, for me.
So Elsinore is more or less what's left after all this exploration. It's been about a year and a half now that I've been rehearsing, performing, rehearsing again. In the beginning it was performed much more in a techno-art kind of environment, never in a serious "Royal National Theatre" space! At first we would do part one and then get some feedback, but of course the first feedback we got was about how to do theatre using technology. With time I encountered people who actually knew what Shakespeare was about, what Hamlet was about, and were able to help me.
RE Did you study the play when you were at school? RL Not in school. In French-speaking Canada Hamlet is something you've seen on TV on Friday night at 11pm with Laurence Olivier. RE But there is a Quebecois translation? I saw your Quebecois version of Macbeth in Paris. RL Yes. We called it Quebecois because it's much easier to describe it that way, but it was an archaic French, the French that people were speaking at more or less the time Shakespeare was writing his plays in England. Some words were very close cousins to the words Shakespeare used. Actually a lot of Shakespeare is French mis-spelt or mispronounced. So there you have it! RE I remember when we first spoke about your work, you said that you thought the most important thing for anybody in the theatre was to retain the element of Play that you have to retain a child-like view. And I thought this show was enchantingly child-like, partly in the way that you have this set, this giant toy, and find a hundred different thing to do with it, but also in the way that a child wants to play all the parts. That is an important element of your work, isn't it? RL Absolutely. I do respect and admire people who stage Hamlet as a psycho-drama or approach it very directly. But I think there's way too much of that around. Because of film, and because of East European culture, the Jewish culture, the Christian-Catholic guilt-ridden culture, everything done in the twentieth-century has to be approached in a Freudian, psychological way. I think that has invaded every kind of theatre. I feel that Shakespeare has lost a lot of its playfulness. I don't pretend that I can offer the absolute Shakespearean experience. On the contrary, Elsinore is more a statement of the playfulness of Hamlet. Shakespeare's play uses Players, they do a play there's a Player King, a Player Queen it's all about playing; Hamlet himself plays with the Players, and uses that as his tool to achieve his ends. RE And playing mad... RL Absolutely. "Mad in craft" at what point does he stop playing and become mad? So anyway, of course it's very child-like (as you very politely put it!), but it is also childish and immature. I think it finds its maturity sometimes, in some areas of the show, but it needs more digging, and digging, and digging. I think now we feel much more at ease in certain speeches and I feel I'm beginning to touch the depths. RE I'm always interested in your work, and when we talked before, I used an image from chemistry of growing a crystal, which baffled you because you hadn't done chemistry at school. Anyway, it's the image of putting a crystal into a solution, and this beautiful, multi-faceted thing gets bigger and bigger. It strikes me that your work starts from some small crystal image, and you add from there. What was the image that you started from on this? RL In this case, it was quite the other way round. When I devise my own work, I do exactly what you describe. We work from a basic resource that we suspect is extremely rich, and everyone adds things and it grows. But in the case of Hamlet, or another Shakespeare play, I tend to work more in the other direction. I do way too much. When we started Elsinore it was about four hours long it was all over the place. So as we go along, much is edited out, in the hope that you'll find that crystal at the end. This show has been getting shorter and shorter. RE But did you start by thinking "How would one person do a production of Hamlet?" RL A lot of my work is image-based, and I wanted to work on something that would force me to work more from the words, to understand what text is and what energy is in the text. The best example around is Shakespeare's work. The idea was still to make it very visual, but to have the images come out of the text. To start with words as small objects and try to squeeze the poetry out of it. So Robert Caux, our musician, composer and sound engineer began to work with me in a workshop, playing with every kind of gadget that was affordable on the market, trying to see how it is still possible today to X-ray a piece like Hamlet. I would deliver speeches into a microphone, and we had this thing called a "sybillants identifier". What it does is to identify in one's voice all the S sounds "ss" "ts" "zz" and some of the "ff"s. I would go through the whole thing, and sometimes we would hit on a passage that was specifically written for sybillants. An example (which was edited out, along with the rest) is in the Ghost's speech, when he says "I am thy father's spirit, due for a certain time to walk the night". There are a lot of Ss and Fs and it's written to sound like a serpent. Of course the serpent is very important in that speech, because it's where he describes Claudius as "the serpent that stung thy father's life". This gadget identified all these sounds, and the snake was omni-present. Of course, we never found a way to stage it properly, so we dumped it, but One Day! It was once again childlike playfulness, to see how modern technology perhaps has a way of discovering things that hadn't been discovered before. I don't have the pretention of having revealed Hamlet under a new light, but it was very interesting for me, as a French-Canadian actor and director, to discover the text in English.Very early on in the process I discovered how infinitely rich it is. As an actor you can use a whole lifetime excavating one speech it's boundless, it's endless. When I started to do it in French, it was interesting to see how the French language is not as theatrical. I wanted to see how could I make the French language as explosive, as bouncy, as energetic as the English.
RE So you were as interested in the sound, the verbal images, as in the visual? RL Absolutely. That was the very first thing. And I didn't just do it overnight. I didn't just decide to do a recording of it. I still had to secure myself with all these things. I needed crutches a couple of masks, because I was too chicken to deliver the lines. Then gradually I got rid of a lot of it and began to enjoy delivering the lines for what they are. RE One of the pleasures for me was that it was at times like a sketchbook for a production. There were moments that were, I think, for every theatre director in the audience, like a shard of ice through the heart as you thought "Oh, why didn't I think of staging such and such a scene like that?" One was the killing of Polonius. I must have seen this play fifty times, and I've never seen that scene staged from Polonius' point of view. It's a beautifully simple thing to do. Did you have that idea before you started to rehearse? RL That's playing around - well - it's a horrible clichι, but necessity is the mother of invention. Even if this production seems very elaborate, there's still only one performer on stage. I've done many solo shows and I just wasn't interested in putting on different coats and changing voices to become the different characters. I wanted to find ways of reinventing the multi-charactered actor. The problems we had with the fact of playing both Polonius and the Queen or Hamlet at the same time meant that we had to be very creative. My way of approaching it and it may be rather a flat way I think that a director has to offer a different point of view. Here in London people will have seen many productions of this play, so it's interesting to shake things around and say "Yes, but what if we saw it from his point of view, or hers?". Or, I couldn't afford to do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the same time, so what about using spy cameras, because that's what they are spies. So, of course, you limit the characters to a single idea. R and G's spy qualities are the only ones that are expressed, but if we had had time to play a bit more with that, we might have given another dimension to them. RE One thing you didn't do was something I did in a production of Hamlet at the Royal Court, with Jonathan Pryce, which was to combine Hamlet and the Ghost the Ghost spoke through Hamlet and I was expecting you to do that. RL Yes. You see, I was stuck with no Horatio! RE And surprisingly, you presented the Ghost very, very simply. I imagine it was a deliberately unadorned image, one of the few that had no electronic enhancement. It was very simple and graphic and symbolic. RL There's something very strange about this play, and I hope one day to do it for real. I employed myself as an actor in this to try to understand it from the inside. But I hope one day to work with a serious, Shakespearean trained actor in this part and to direct him, because I have experienced in doing Elsinore some of the, I think, flaws in the play, which invite you to say "How do I solve this problem?" One of the things that's fundamentally wrong about the texts that we have today, is in that soliloquy "To be or not to be". Hamlet talks about "the country from whose bourn no traveller returns". Up until then, he's convinced that he's seen his father, someone who has returned a few times. Something is wrong. I don't think I would have noticed that or thought it if I hadn't tried to perform it, because then you have to put yourself into a position where you understand the difficulties and paradoxes of performing all these characters. Some of them I just rush at, others I try to understand a bit more. It's a very tricky thing to do, but eventually, if I have the chance of staging Hamlet, it may pay off. RE It's like the writer's technique of putting yourself in each character's mind as you write them. RL Exactly. And, because Shakespeare was also a director and an actor. I think that's something we've lost. We put ourselves in a hierarchy. As soon as we call ourselves a director, we think we have to be teachers or coaches and put ourselves in a position where we don't compromise anything else than our staging ideas. It's very important for me to experience the problems of what it is to speak Shakespeare, what it is to play this part, how do you fill the gaps. It's interesting to discuss that with the actors, but when you experience it yourself, it's much more interesting. RE When are you going to do this production of Hamlet? RL I don't know. When I am mature! RE I think you're definitely grown up enough now. RL No. For the parts that I've done, maybe I'd feel secure enough to work with actors on a version of Hamlet that had the scenes I've presented in Elsinore. But there are whole chunks of the play that are still, for me, like a huge jungle, unexplored. It's very difficult for me to grasp certain things. There's also something about the period, and where it happened that is much more alien to me than it can be to a British director. I'd have a lot of homework to do before I could actually grasp all the facets of that jewel. RE But surely that's an advantage in finding a new perspective. You talk about approaching your production like a film director. One of the chief differences between a stage director and a film director is that a film director is choosing the audience's point of view, allowing the audience only a single point of view at any one time. Whereas in the theatre, one of the things that you do startlingly well, is to allow us several different points of view. You turn the crystal in the light. So I would imagine when you approach the production of Hamlet you would actually be taking a much tighter perspective on it. RL But you still have to give a lot of leeway to the audience's imagination. I know people don't believe me, but Elsinore is extremely low-tech. It looks extremely high-tech, and there's been a lot of high-tech in the workshops and in the rehearsal room, but I've replaced traditional shadow-play by simple live video work. It's very, very basic, and the material we have is not that sophisticated. It's clever. There are a lot of very clever people and engineers who have worked on this and made it what it is, but it's actually very simple, the way it functions, and there are a lot of people backstage, like the good old days, pushing the set and turning things with their hands.There's nothing that electronic about it. I think that there would be something totally wrong in not inviting the audience to understand how it's done as you perform it. A good example in the show is when I use video. All the video is live, there's nothing pre-recorded. For me that's an interesting technology to invite into the theatre now, because people now know how it works. Fifteen, twenty years ago, when people did not have access to video cameras, they would have been flabbergasted to see a production using video in this way. You put people in a very unempowered position if you don't show them the strings or give them the clues to your approach. Today everybody has a little video camera, or has seen one used, so they know the problems. When I use it on stage, I think people actually appreciate that. They say, "Oh, he's got a camera there. That's what he did."
RE So it's the equivalent of when, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, you had a line of kitchen chairs and used them to make a bridge or a pyramid. RL The thing is, you have to embed into people's minds and memories elements that they relate to. So when people go back home and see their kitchen chairs, there's something more to it. The memory of what you did creates an aura that stays there for a while. I think it's important that you connect to people at that level. RE Don't you worry that, when you come to do your production of Hamlet and you don't have a single actor playing all the parts, in some way you'll be robbing yourself of the possibility of supplying that kind of poetry that is born out of necessity? RL Yes, I believe there is as much chance of falling flat on your face with this kind of thing as of triggering people's imagination. You go for it and at first you fall on your face, then you fall less on your face, then you start connecting and it pays back. I think that something we'll have to get used to as audience members, is that in the future, theatre will have to be more than a project. There's something about a show that's not slick, not finished, that's still kind of hanging there, that has technical problems, that is more and more appealing to audiences, I feel. I think the slick production, everything-falling-into-place kind of entertainment, now belongs to the film world, to the video world. RE Don't you think that comes from the soft machinery, ie the human beings, that are essentially fallible and frail? That's the thing that can go wrong in the theatre. RL Oh yes, absolutely, but now theatre is so safe, so well controlled... RE But if anything goes wrong here [in Elsinore], it's painful. I'm not sure that that does empower an audience. Doesn't an audience get very disconcerted? Don't they start to fear for you? RL It depends. I think there's an attitude you have to adopt. We have a record of 24 performances in a row when it did not go wrong. There were about 100 when it did go wrong, and there's only three left! Every two nights it fails, stops, we have to bring the curtain in, say we have a technical problem and everybody laughs because they all read about Edinburgh when we had to cancel. But what do you want to do, pretend it's not there, it's not happening? In some way, you have to do your best. RE Are you saying that in some way it's an advantage, because in some way you make the audience complicit? RL Well listen, the National Circus of China used to tour with a show where everything was so perfect that they had a man each night would go round to see the artists and say to one: "You fall tonight", otherwise people are bored. You have to remind them "It's not TV you know, it's the real thing." RE But there is a paradox because what makes people fallible and frail and things go wrong is when people aren't quite certain they can hear you, when the lighting isn't very accurate, and when there isn't sophisticated machinery. So in a sense you are contradicting yourself. RL I wouldn't say the same thing of Seven Streams which needs to be more contained and slick because there are so many complexities in the writing. You want at least the envelope to seem OK and the actors to look as if they know what they're saying, that what they say has been written. REBut in that there was a long scene set in Amsterdam the euthenasia scene which had the feeling of precisely what you're describing because the actors did appear to improvise, it was so naturalistic that it seemed as frail and vulnerable as real life. But that was the highest form of art. RL But it was improvised. The only thing we knew was that it worked. We improvised it once and it worked. RE But I saw it twice and it was identical. RL Of course there are some things that you can't reinvent two hundred times. RE No, I'm just saying that it was like the Chinese circus, it simulated variation and risk but that's what I think is the highest form of skill in the theatre making it look as though you're making it up. Actually, I remember this Hamlet where Jonathan Pryce spoke the Ghost's lines from his belly, one reviewer criticised his performance as Hamlet because he said he appeared to be making up the lines as he went along! And of course, with Shakespearean verse there is a kind of strictness to it, but on the other hand you're trying to find total spontaneity. RL You see, I just understood some of the reasons I have problems performing Elsinore, because I'm really performing it as if it's not new as written. There's also a paradox that there's something about the discovery of this text for me that I'm trying to hold there, but I'm not necessarily doing my own thing. And that should be the next step. RE Are you going to get another actor to play in Elsinore? RL Yes I am. A British actor! I'm not going to name him because I don't want to burden him any more than he will be burdened. RE You'll be directing him? RL Absolutely. And the show will have nothing to do with what you've seen here. We've had two or three meetings and there are some things that he wants to perform which I've taken out because, once again, I'm too chicken to do them. Elsinore is actually the crate into which you put the eggs you want to. It's a Hamlet game, and there are some people who are moved by that game and some for whom it doesn't resonate, and that's also OK. There's no universal Hamlet. I always find it incredible to hear directors, who I won't name here, say "I've solved Hamlet, this is the definitive Hamlet." I think it's been written to grow, be organic and change with the times in which it's performed. I've toured many places with this show and there are places where people don't go for it at all, and other places people just grab onto it. In Sweden people have been doing these dark, Scandinavian Hamlets and you feel that the fourth wall is about six feet thick, so actors who I thought would say "Oh, that's not Hamlet" instead would say "My God!". It's another way of playing around with it. It doesn't mean it's the way it should be done, but it's one vision of it, one analysis. Not all the themes hold in this concept; the whole political side for example has been completely discarded it didn't fit. Audience questionHow does it feel to be on stage on your own for an hour and a half? RL It feels very lonely but it is really a dialogue with the audience, so some evenings you feel more alone than others. But I do two kinds of shows. One where there are loads of people around and there's dialogue and characters and it's all great fun, and there are others where I'm alone on stage. Whenever I do a solo show, whatever the theme is, I think it's about loneliness. So this was a way for me of breaking down what I was going to keep of Hamlet, and it's about Hamlet's loneliness. You could also do a production where there are twenty five actors on stage and his loneliness is not an important theme in that context. Among its many themes, it's a play about loneliness, and that is the thing I try to stick onto the characters. Not just Hamlet's loneliness, but Ophelia's and other characters'. It's a play where many people are alone. RE In fact, viewed from backstage, Robert is anything but alone. Apart from the fact that he has a doppelganger, there are a whole team of people and in fact it's a rather moving display of theatre as collaborative art. Audience question
Did you say you would do Elsinore again using actors to play individual parts?
RL Not Elsinore I said I'd do a full length Hamlet one day. But before that I'd try to do another kind of experience, maybe using two or three people. It's a lifelong project to try to do Hamlet, or The Tempest, or any Shakespeare play. I think you really have to visit all the little chambers before you could actually do it. That also means a fundamental change in style. The reason I do this alone is that I don't think any of the actors I work with would be willing to embark on this crazy venture, so I do it with a lot of technicians who have great fun with it because they are creative.
Audience questionCould I ask you what you think theatre is? I know it's quite a big question... RL It's difficult to give you a definitive answer, but I always come back to the same old notion that it's a gathering, a meeting point. A gathering in the sense that a group of artists get together to tell a story, and also the collective audience. The audience in a theatre room is very different from the audience to a film, because they actually change everything on the stage by their energy. You can't do that to a TV screen. Audience question
Was Elsinore supposed to be a live film, in a way? RL I deal with both worlds. I do some films, some plays, and I work with a lot of technicians. I deal with all these different artists who are all storytellers, basically, all using different means. I think we're moving more and more towards a clashing of these ways of telling stories. Whether we want it or not, I think theatre is more influenced by film. Film at the start was frozen theatre, in a way, and you can't do a Hamlet today without taking into account that an audience has a televisual way of listening to stories. It's a new vocabulary and you have to take that into account. All these things converge, so they either clash or merge. I think there is a way for these different areas of storytelling to merge. This show, for some people, is pure theatre. Others say "That's not theatre, that's film" or an installation. Whatever you call it, it's inviting different ways of telling stories to try to live together. I'm happy about the meeting of these different mediums, and particularly in one specific moment in this show, a very simple moment, when Hamlet talks to Horatio about how he feels about him. There's one camera back there and a projector in front. There's no wizardry, but it presents a meeting point of a live actor and a video image of him. The live actor has nothing to do with the video image, he's a different character, even if I am performing them both, because the video image is two-dimensional, he's bigger, he's made of electricity and light, he's a completely different being. For me it's the only moment in this show where I really feel there's a pivot between theatre and electronic mediums, that these two types of storytelling can actually make dialogue. RE That's the wonderful thing in the theatre, and in this show particularly, that you always retain the human scale, and although you vary the scale of other images, you retain the scale of your human body. RL This set, as I was saying, is a sketch for an eventual, classical, Elizabethan set for Hamlet. If one studies principals of Elizabethan staging, it's all there in this set. The most interesting thing is that door, that kind of window [the frame at the centre of the setting], it's all over the place in Hamlet doorways, windows, the grave. For me it was important to try to see how I can perform a Hamlet that deals with this theme. Because of all the technology around it, it looks as if I'm fighting with a machine, but in fact, for me that was the only thing I asked for from the set designer give me that frame. Audience question
You seem to be creating a focal point at which several different times and cultural differences meet through you. Did you ever find that Shakespeare's text rejects a particular aspect of the technology you bring to it or vice versa? RL Quite the opposite. The only thing that allowed me to do it, and in Great Britain of all places, was the faith that the reason Shakespeare was such a fantastic poet, was that he wasn't just a great writer, he was fascinated by machines and was a great theatre craftsman. And I'm sure he wrote specifically for the theatre, and not, like a lot of people who write today, to be published. It may be sacrilegious to say this, but I'm sure a lot of the soliloquies were written because there was a noisy set change. I hope that's the reason. There's something extremely practical about staging Shakespeare, it's never tough to bring in the next scene, because it's all been thought out, it's mathematical, and you see that he was a man of the stage. That's a lack in today's writers. I don't have a knowledge of the British writers, but I can tell you that in North America a play is not crammed into the meatgrinder of the theatre any more, it's often published before it's been staged. There's a divorce between directors and writers and they certainly don't want their lines to be spoken. I think what's wonderful about Shakespeare is that I'm sure he too was obsessed by theatre machinery, but probably in a more reasonable way than I am... Audience question
What's the process you use in finding designers? RL Usually they are people whose work I have seen, and who have a sculptural approach to theatre, not a decorative approach, because that's my taste. I like people who are much more sculptors and engineers than too decorative. But also because I am a decorator myself in my productions. Some of the designers I work with become very directorial and I become a designer, so there's a real dialogue. Sometimes I see things that are absolutely wonderful but I know I won't work with that designer because he has his own strength and the story is told just with his designs. Audience question
You've spoken before of Elsinore as being a projection of the inside of Hamlet's head. Did you see the other characters as coming from his head too? RL Because I was going to do this first exploration of Hamlet alone, it felt very comfortable to assume that all of these characters were intimately related to Hamlet, whether by family ties and the incestuous ties that are all over the play, or by his own madness, which of course is a lot about multiplying your own personality. For me these two things madness and incest are two very important, strong and obvious themes in Hamlet, and this would be stressed by the fact that I am alone to play all the characters, and all the characters seem to wear goatee beards! RE Last time we spoke in public, Robert said something wonderfully unfashionable and very inspiring. We were talking about the relative virtues of film and theatre and the possible synthesis of the two media. Robert said he feels very pessimistic about the art of film but very optimistic about the art of theatre, and certainly when I see his work it makes me feel that the theatre has got a whole lot of life in it.