Farce and Fable

Most people think of fairy tales as a world of innocence and happy endings. Not if you ask the children, though, who thrive on the fears of dragons and wolves and grandmothers in disguise. There is nothing innocent about fairytales; they take the language of fantasy to talk about primal fears.

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen in 2005, the Danish Andersen Foundation commissioned the world-acclaimed Canadian theatre-film-opera director Robert Lepage for The Andersen Project, at the Volkstheater, opening the Wiener Festwochen’s 29 theater works. Part travelogue, part animation, part documentary drama, Lepage takes his audience on a magical journey through the creative twists and turns of one of the world’s best-known fairytale writers, using a series of trick photography in which the protagonists come in and out of a screen on the stage, making a brilliant parody about the ways an artistic production comes into being: a farce about people in the so-called cultural industries.

Like Andersen, Lepage takes a realistic setting where Character One, the songwriter-dramaturge, leaves Ottawa for Paris to work with Character Two, the Opera Director, who wants to stage Andersen’s Dryad folktales. Between these polarized personalities, a dynamic tension unleashes settings for other imagined roles, including Character Three a young, Moroccan graffiti-artist who cleans the peep-show booths right below Character One’s lodgings, and a “drug-addicted dog” the writer has to care for as part of a house-sitting arrangement with “a Parisian resident” who goes to Quebec and ends up sleeping with the writer’s “wife.”

Lepage who had originally conceived the theatrical piece as a solo-performance with himself acting out the three protagonists, has now been succeeded by Québequois Yves Jacques, who has performed the work 80 times over the last three years.

The Andersen Project is both farce and fable: The loneliness oozing from Andersen’s tale of the Dryads becomes a vehicle for Andersen’s moral realism: his concern for people, especially women, longing to leave their “tree-holes” and rooted boundaries that Lepage/Jacques incisively portrayed. Some of the most endearing scenes verge on the pathetic, but light-heartedness never succumbs: the author-actor dances with a mannequin of Swedish singer Jenny Lind – the love of Andersen’s life; and walks through a Bois du Boulogne of leafless, stylized tree-trunks, the “non-dog” at the end of his remote-controlled leash – itself, a hilarious performance.

The audience at the premiere gave the play sustained applause. Nevertheless, one wondered if Festwochen director Stephanie Carp’s decision to include the piece was influenced by the peep-show scenarios where the Paris Opera Director gives himself sexual release in front of the booth’s erotic images, while answering his cell phone and lying to his family about his actual whereabouts. To his frustration, the janitor comes immediately to wash off the masturbated semen, thus cleansing every trace of the Director’s very post-modern relief. It seemed a little much.

The program notes suggest that Lepage himself had uncovered Andersen’s habit of masturbation, “painstakingly” documented in his diaries and here the fulcrum of the piece. With so much sex and intrigue, other possible projections are eclipsed.

Lepage is not new to the Festwochen, which he took by storm some years back with The Seven Streams of the River Ota, a tour de force in seven acts. Cynics may have other preoccupations, but this reviewer is left wondering why The Andersen Project came to Vienna so late.