Director, Playwright Robert Lepage to Take Stage in Toronto

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Canadian 56-year-old award-winning theatre, film and opera director, Robert Lepage, who is also credited as a playwright and actor, is scheduled to make a rare speaking appearance in Toronto next week. The event is hosted by his most excited and loyal followers, former Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson and essayist and author John Ralston Saul, since Clarkson once said that “we try to see almost everything he does.”

The Institute for Canadian Citizenship, founded together by Clarkson and Saul, is hosting the talk in partnership with the Stratford Festival at the Isabel Bader Theatre on Oct. 18. According to Clarkson, the Quebec City-born winner of the latest Glenn Gould award, Lepage, is simply a “genius.” Whereas on the other hand, Saul refers to him as the “single most cutting edge theatre figure.” Lepage was first brought on stage for a one-man show Le Polygraphe in the late ‘80s by Clarkson for an audience of about 200 in Montreal. She recalls that “he turned the wall into the roof with his foot,” adding that “it was just wonderful.”

Later when Clarkson found out that Lepage was bilingual, she brought his work to an English Canadian audience through her CBC show, Adrienne Clarkson Presents. Lepage is quite popular to pushing artistic boundaries, especially by using video projections as he did in his production of the Richard Wagner’s four-part Ring for New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Lepage both reinterprets classic works while also evolving his own work like rewriting his 1991 play Needles and Opium last year.