There are many reasons to be grateful to the organisers of the 40th Dublin Theatre Festival. Not least among them is the opportunity to have seen Robert Lepage's creation for Ex Machina (viewable here again only tomorrow afternoon and evening). It offers an astonishing demonstration of highly creative stage engineering and multi-media set design. It also offers a terrifying glimpse of a deadening cul de sac into which live interactive theatre might be about to divert, in which it might die.
Here, notwithstanding the most ingenious staging and the singular eye and command of its creator, is almost the antithesis of live theatre (already more commercially expressed in some of the more popular mega musicals that have dominated big city box offices from time to time over the past decade or so). Shakespeare's massive text has been eclectically plundered, its original narrative threads unravelled, its huge emotional drives trivialised to serve the purpose of the design.
Such words as have been used are generally poorly rendered and actively risible in the final scenes, and the two actors who have been charged with delivering them have themselves become hardly much more than part of the frequently moving sets with almost no opportunity to communicate directly with their audience. Worse, the audience has been left with virtually no means of communicating with the players, blanked out of the performance by a constant sound track, changing projections, tilting and revolving stages and live video projections.
A few left quietly during the performance. A number offered a standing ovation at the end. This reviewer felt he might more profitably have been at the movies or watching television, yet grateful for having been able to see Mr Lepage's prodigious design skills and hopeful that some day they may be put to the service of author and actor rather than the other way around.