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 — the Canadian famously dubbed "an alchemist of modern imagistic theater" — 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 — which I saw in Edinburgh, and which is being staged here with Japanese subtitles — 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.