Reviewed by:

• Robert Lepage’s Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global by Karen Fricker
• Aleksandar Dundjerovic

It has been twenty-seven years since Remy Charest’s book of interviews with Robert Lepage, Connecting Flights (1997), appeared in English translation. It marked the beginning of an organized exploration of Lepage’s creative practices, offering valuable insights into his unique approach to theatre. Lepage, a Canadian theatre and film director, actor, and playwright, has long been known for his aesthetically and culturally intriguing productions that emphasize collaboration between actors and audiences. Connecting Flights also addressed the emergence of global theatre, which gained momentum in the late 1980s and ’90s, largely due to the festival theatre culture.

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence of critical scholarship focusing on Lepage’s body of work, exploring topics like media, space, and global culture. These English-language books have centered on themes such as intercultural encounters (Carson, 2021), theatrical space creation (Reynolds, 2019), scenographic dramaturgy (Poll, 2018), identity and nation exploration (Koustas, 2016), and the language of a visual laboratory (Fouquet, 2014). Karen Fricker’s Robert Lepage’s Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global (2020) is part of this renewed interest in the artist’s work. Her focus is Lepage’s relationship with global culture and theatre audiences. Fricker examines the globalization of theatre and performance practice, drawing on theoretical and methodological approaches from cinema, affect, and queer studies. She argues that in the early and middle stages of Lepage’s development, making theatre was for a big international festival—it was theatre that related globally to the festival audience—and that globalization had a crucial impact on shaping Lepage’s theatricality. On the grounds of such contention, she places Lepage’s work within the context of a globalized cultural perspective, exploring the use of global theatre language of new technology and the dramaturgy of cinema and media.

The book is divided into seven chapters, spanning Lepage’s career and encompassing his earlier famous works from the 1980s and ’90s, such as The Dragons’ Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, Needles and Opium, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, as well as more recent productions such as The Andersen Project, The Blue Dragon, Lipsynch, and 887. Many of these productions have been on international tours for several years, captivating audiences worldwide. However, it is essential to recognize that the book’s relevance might have been different had it been published a decade or more earlier. Globalism has evolved from an intercultural fascination with the exchange of aesthetics and cultural interconnection to the domination of Western cultures over local traditions and homogenization. It is no longer seen as the favored expression of a plurality of distinct voices of global theatre, but rather as a glib term for the “Davos” festival audience who adhered to similar models of living and branded products, concepts that Lepage often satirizes in his performances with self-deprecating humor. Furthermore, Lepage has been relatively absent from the international festival circuit in recent years, and his productions are now of a different grand scale than his earlier works like The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Seven Streams of the River Ota.

While the book focuses on Lepage’s original work, as the title suggests, it needs to provide an adequate perspective to contextualize his early career within an historical context. For instance, Lepage’s characters often represent the West’s gaze on others, particularly in Asia, which remains unexamined. In offering a globalist interpretation of his productions, without historical framing, Fricker lands Lepage’s characters in a very Disneyfied and romanticized view of others, and she thereby misses a more developed critique that would reflect on thinking about diversity, decolonization, and representation of identities of non-Western characters in Lepage’s productions. Nonetheless, the book is not without a clear and current critique of the artist’s work. The last two chapters offer valuable insights into Lepage’s position within the context of neoliberalism and authorship (chapter 6) and examine his successful solo shows as a form of theatre that caters to a global...

 审阅者：

• 
  罗伯特·勒佩奇的原创舞台作品：凯伦·弗里克的《让剧院全球化》
•  亚历山大·邓杰罗维奇

雷米·查雷斯特 (Remy Charest) 采访罗伯特·勒佩奇 (Robert Lepage) 的书《转机航班》(Connecting Flights，1997) 英文译本问世已有 27 年了。它标志着对勒帕奇的创作实践进行有组织的探索的开始，为他独特的戏剧方法提供了宝贵的见解。勒帕吉是一位加拿大戏剧和电影导演、演员和剧作家，长期以来以其在美学和文化上引人入胜的作品而闻名，这些作品强调演员和观众之间的合作。转机航班还讨论了全球戏剧的兴起，该戏剧在 20 世纪 80 年代末和 90 年代蓬勃发展，很大程度上得益于节日戏剧文化。

在过去的十年中，批判性学术界重新兴起，重点关注勒帕吉的作品，探索媒体、空间和全球文化等主题。这些英文书籍的主题包括跨文化相遇（Carson，2021）、戏剧空间创作（Reynolds，2019）、场景戏剧（Poll，2018）、身份和民族探索（Koustas，2016）以及语言视觉实验室（Fouquet，2014）。凯伦·弗里克 (Karen Fricker) 的罗伯特·勒佩奇 (Robert Lepage) 的原创舞台作品：让剧院全球化 (2020) 是人们对这位艺术家的作品重新产生兴趣的一部分。她关注的焦点是勒帕吉与全球文化和戏剧观众的关系。弗里克借鉴电影、情感和酷儿研究的理论和方法论，审视了戏剧和表演实践的全球化。她认为，在勒帕吉发展的早期和中期阶段，制作戏剧是为了一个大型的国际节日——它是与全球节日观众产生联系的戏剧——而全球化对塑造勒帕吉的戏剧性有着至关重要的影响。基于这样的争论，她将勒帕奇的作品置于全球化文化视角的背景下，探索新技术的全球戏剧语言的运用以及电影和媒体的戏剧性。

全书共分为七章，涵盖了勒帕吉的职业生涯，涵盖了他在 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代早期的著名作品，如《龙三部曲》、《芬奇》、《地壳板块》、《针与鸦片》、《太田七溪》等。最近的作品如《安徒生计划》、《蓝龙》、《Lipsynch》和《887》。其中许多作品已经进行了数年的国际巡演，吸引了世界各地的观众。然而，必须认识到，如果这本书早十年或更早出版，它的相关性可能会有所不同。全球主义已经从对审美交流和文化互联的跨文化迷恋，演变为西方文化对当地传统和同质化的统治。它不再被视为全球戏剧中多种不同声音的首选表达方式，而是作为“达沃斯”节日观众的一个油嘴滑舌的术语，他们坚持类似的生活模式和品牌产品，而勒帕奇经常在他的作品中讽刺这些概念。表演带有自嘲式的幽默。此外，近年来，勒帕吉在国际音乐节上相对淡出，他的作品规模也与他早期的《龙三部曲》和《太田七溪》等作品不同。

正如标题所示，虽然这本书重点介绍了勒帕奇的原创作品，但它需要提供足够的视角，将他的早期职业生涯置于历史背景中。例如，勒帕奇笔下的人物常常代表西方对其他人的看法，尤其是在亚洲，这种看法仍未得到审视。弗里克在没有历史框架的情况下对他的作品进行了全球主义的解释，她将勒佩奇的角色置于一种非常迪士尼化和浪漫化的对其他人的看法中，因此她错过了一种更成熟的批评，这种批评将反思对多样性、非殖民化和身份表征的思考。勒帕奇作品中的非西方角色。尽管如此，这本书并非没有对这位艺术家的作品进行清晰且当前的批评。最后两章提供了对勒帕奇在新自由主义和作者身份背景下的地位的宝贵见解（第 6 章），并考察了他成功的个展作为一种迎合全球的戏剧形式……