WELCOME LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
Christian Lapointe takes on the founding text of anti-play – the playful and destabilizing Offending the Audience by Peter Handke. Nearly fifty years after its creation, Lapointe reinvents the play’s celebratory radicalism. Taking the show’s title and the line “This is not a play” quite literally, he casts the audience as the only living character in the piece, placing the spectators face to face with themselves. They are both the subject and the object of this unusual performance, where theatrical representation is turned inside out.
In this refreshing and fun-loving recreation, Christian Lapointe leads the affront using astonishing synthesized voices. Subjected to the orders of dehumanized robots, the spectators will be chased out of the theatre – we won’t tell you how! – by the infamous cascade of insults at the end of Handke’s play. Is it an object of live cinéma-verité, studio art or digital theatre? Who knows?
Théâtre La Chapelle Length : 1 h In French
June 3 – 7 at 9:00 pm
Tickets: $28 Under 30 / Over 65: $23 Sales taxes and order processing fees included
Between Doing and Portraying
Since founding Théâtre Péril in Quebec City in 2000, the writer and director Christian Lapointe has pursued a singular career, creating theatrical objects of demanding density where poetry, death and reality combine to question the existential emptiness of contemporary life. Inspired by the symbolism of William Butler Yeats – his first play was a trilogy consisting of Chien de Culann, Le Seuil du palais du roi (2003) and the triptych Calvaire / Résurrection / Purgatoire under the title Limbes (2009) – and by the textual density and relation to reality found in the work of Samuel Beckett, Lapointe gradually focused his research on the pressures of reality that any form of representation in the theatre demands. Whether it be his reworkings of symbolist writers (Yeats and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, whose unpresentable Axel he staged in 2006), brutal contemporary texts (Vu d’ici, based on the novel by Mathieu Arsenault, 2008; L’enfant matière by Larry Tremblay at Théâtre Blanc, 2012) or his own writing (C.H.S., presented at the FTA in 2007 and at the Avignon Festival in 2009; Anky ou la fuite, opéra du désordre, 2008; Trans(e), 2010; and Sepsis, 2012), Christian Lapointe creates, to quote the critic Hervé Guay, “atypical experiences from which one rarely emerges unscathed”. He is associate artist with Recto-Verso since 2011 and was recently appointed artistic director at Théâtre Blanc, in Québec.
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