Almost a year after ¡°887¡± premiered in Toronto in July 2015, and following five-star reviews at every stop on a multinational tour that took in the world¡¯s biggest annual theater event, the Edinburgh International Festival, the latest play by Robert Lepage ¡ª the Canadian famously dubbed ¡°an alchemist of modern imagistic theater¡± ¡ª is now set to draw Japanese audiences into its worlds.
With its title echoing the number of the cramped apartment in the French-speaking city of Quebec where 58-year-old Lepage grew up with his hero, his taxi-driver father, as well as his mother, brother, two sisters and a grandmother stricken with Alzheimer¡¯s, ¡°887¡± is a solo autobiographical work in which its creator plays himself.
Highly kinetic in trademark Lepage style, the play ¡ª which I saw in Edinburgh, and which is being staged here with Japanese subtitles ¡ª comprises scenes that switch and morph between his present hectic life and his 1960s and ¡®70s youth when the province of Quebec was riven by its so-called Quiet Revolution, a movement pursuing independence from, and economic parity with, English-speaking Canada.
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