The Andersen Project (play)

The Andersen Project
Sydney Theatre (8th Jan, 2006)

A Canadian writer goes to France, the Paris Opera having commissioned him to adapt 'The Dryad', a Hans Christian Andersen story, into a children's operetta. And so begins a wonderfully interwoven tale of three characters; the writer, the director and a janitor at a sex shop, above which the writer resides.

Robert LePage plays the three characters each haunted by the pathetic nature of their lives but who all react in different ways. In essence, the play is about coming to terms with sex. The Andersen story underscores a longing for sensuality but each of the characters are more or less faced with a callous version of the act; the writer in escaping his lover's longings to procreate, the director in the inevitability of his wife's infidelity and his addiction to pornography and the janitor faced with the unending drudgery of having to clean used sex booths.

There is a simplicity in the storytelling that ironically emphasises the complexity in humanity and LePage uses this well, scoring laughs at regular intervals. Some of the humour is cultural such as the recurring motif of French workers' willingness to strike, while other laughs come from the characters themselves, like LePage's mostly caricature French director playing against his insecure, self-deprecating writer.

The interaction with props and the film backdrop was especially engaging to watch. I often felt I was watching a 3D movie rather than a stage play at points. There was a certain poignancy in Andersen's dance/disrobe with his would-be lover ('played' by a mannequin in 19th century period costume) and also when the director tells his daughter a bedtime story, Andersen's 'The Shadow', casting shadows and making silhouettes using a lamp.

The close of the performance is purposely anti-climactic and open-ended as the writer inconclusively ends his tale (that he began to the opening night audience in the beginning) and only then is the loneliness, the sparsity of the one-man show evident. Life goes on. LePage illustrates it well.

P.S: The janitor goes on strike.

**** - tight, human, visually splendid