Robert Lepage: Lipsynch

So, fresh from two days in bed, on Saturday I headed off to the Barbican centre to see Robert Lepage's new play, Lipsynch. For those who are not in the know, as I was certainly not in the know, Robert Lepage is one of the world's leading dramatists, and a new play by him is a very big deal indeed. A very big deal in the sense that the entire audience was full of salivating thesps. And a very big deal in the sense that Lipsynch is nine hours long.

I know, I know. Who in their right mind would go and see a nine hour long play? But I'm not in my right mind, and I have been getting more and more into theatre recently, and I quite fancied the idea of myself as the kind of cool, in the know, theatre-going person who would go to see a nine-hour-long play at the Barbican by a hip dramatist. And I had the feeling that either it would be absolutely marvelous or it would be horrendously awful but one way or another it would be interesting and noteworthy and I'd have loads to say about it.

It wasn't. It wasn't absolutely marvelous, horrendously awful, interesting, or noteworthy. It was fine. As it turns out, being nine hours long was the most remarkable thing about it.

The structure of the play was in nine parts, like interlinked short stories, each following one of a number of overlapping characters. Overall, thematically, the stories investigated questions of voice, music, family relationships, sexual exploitation, and so on in ways that were diverting but unenlightening. So apparently prostitution exploits the vulnerable, and family love can be stifling but ultimately conquers all, and some things can't be expressed in conversation but only through music, and so on. Feeling intrigued yet? No? Me neither.

The performances were a bit erratic (some cast members surely chosen for singing ability rather than acting chops), the set was so impossibly complex each scene change took several minutes and bits kept falling off so crew members had to run on mid-scene and fix it, the dialogue was in a number of languages but the surtitles didn't always work - so much of it was shambolic that in the end I felt like I had seen a brave school play.

On the other hand it was rarely dull, though the truly good moments were pretty sporadic. I was genuinely moved once (in nine hours!) in a segment where a voice-over artist recovering from a brain tumour struggles to remember the precise sound of her father's voice. Another segment featured a hilarious slapstick funeral complete with farting coffin. A brilliant sequence focused on a man in drag as an old lady lipsynching perfectly to a long anecdote in her voice. And the set - when functioning - could at times be so good that it upstaged the actors. But all of this really wasn't enough.

Ultimately the play was a disappointment. Even though it sucessfully passed nine hours of my life without too much discomfort or boredom, I really didn't feel I had got anything more edifying than I would have in nine hours of watching TV. I would almost have prefered something awful because it would have suggested a few risks being taken. At one moment in the play, one of the characters says of a home video "But it's so banal!" to which another replies, "Well, that's life", which neatly sums up my feelings about the whole thing.

A banal three stars out of five...