As an actor and world-class theater, film and opera director, Robert Lepage has become renowned for his unconventional productions using high-tech devices. Now, though, Tokyo audiences can feast their eyes and minds on this 56-year-old French-Canadian's early masterpiece, 1987's "Le Polygraphe (Polygraph)," a play that portrays the pain heartless society can inflict on individuals.
With a style that rests on intuition and allows actors and technicians to invent as they go along, Lepage nonetheless locates cross-cultural experiences and diverse baroque settings at the heart of his works. Rather than relying on themes, principles and subjects, his creative process also draws on resources as disparate as memories, places, anecdotes, historical events and decorative elements that he infuses with meaning and emotion.
With such fertile ground on which to cultivate a free association of ideas, Lepage's works are wont to discover and reveal poetic connections between seemingly unrelated elements in an organic manner, like a tree whose branches grow in unexpected directions.