In 2000, French-Canadian auteur Robert Lepage staged a play about the space race. It was a huge hit, attracting rave reviews, eventually being staged in 45 cities around the world, being made into a film (released in 2003) and winning a swag of awards.
That stage production, revived almost two decades later and currently touring Australia’s festival circuit, doesn’t feel dated. Apart from a few near-obsolete bits of technology as props (who still has a landline at home?), it could have been written today.
It is ostensibly the story of two brothers. Philippe is a hopeless academic who we meet in front of a panel of unseen academics, trying to defend his thesis on the effect of space travel on popular culture. He has an air of failure about him. His younger brother, with whom he shared a room when they were young, is his opposite: Andre, a television weatherman, is brash, materialistic, loud and confident – a yang to Philippe’s tentative and unsure yin.
But Philippe is a lot more relatable. The world is not enough for him. He yearns for escape, an experience of life beyond our planet. He sees people on Earth like goldfish, constantly circling the same places and situations. How can they be happy with that? Why can’t they be like him – curious about space, how to get there, and how to communicate with other beings while there?
The brothers’ struggles are essentially an allegory for the play’s overarching theme: the space race between the United States and Russia. Archival footage charts elements of the race. The networks eventually tire of showing it, but Philippe’s passion does not wane. In a flashback to his teenage years, one of the play’s more poignant moments, he takes LSD and lies on the Plains of Abraham – the plateau outside Quebec where the pivotal battle between British and French armies took place in 1759 – and stares at the moon, trying to see a Russian satellite.
It’s hard to believe The Far Side of the Moon is a one-man show. Yves Jacques – taking over from Lepage himself – plays all roles including both brothers, their mother and a doctor. The one-act production runs at a lengthy two-and-a-half hours (it could have lost 15 minutes of plot), making it a feat of endurance and versatility for the performer, and Jacques is exceptional.
The fairly simple story is made magical by inventive staging that shapeshifts as frequently as Jacques changes character, deploying everything from mirrors to chalkboards, cameras, trick lighting and video, from newsreels to home movies. (One of the play’s funnier sequences is when Philippe films the interior of his apartment – room by room – in an effort to explain to the aliens the domestic habits of humans.) Laurie Anderson’s score is a real treat – appropriately spacey and atmospheric. There is also a small amount of puppetry, but the main prop is a washing machine – a round portal projected on to the stage. More than it initially appears, it becomes an MRI machine, an access point to space, a birth canal and a goldfish bowl.
Tickets to The Far Side of the Moon are rarer than hen’s teeth, with all of the three performances at Perth festival sold out. But theatregoers in Adelaide and Auckland may still be able to snatch some up for forthcoming performances. The play reminded me a little of the work of Michel Houellebecq – showing us that here on Earth we are all essentially alone and cut off from each other. Despite its beauty, The Far Side of the Moon made for melancholy viewing. Perhaps things are better in space.
The Far Side of the Moon is showing at Adelaide festival from 2 to 7 March, and Auckland Arts festival from 22 to 25 March
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