Québécois Shakespeare goes Global: Robert Lepage's Coriolan

Summary

Speaking in advance of the Montréal performances of his Cycle Shakespeare, staged at international venues between 1992 and 1994, Robert Lepage described the tour stop in his home province as a response to the double colonization that Québec has historically experienced within Canada. Explaining that, in an effort to defend French culture, Québécois theatres have traditionally staged Molière and Racine more frequently than Shakespeare, Lepage remarked, ‘Shakespeare, jusqu’à présent, était réservé au Canada anglophone. Il nous était toujours présenté comme un auteur de luxe que l'on pouvait lire mais pas monter’ [Shakespeare, until now, has been reserved for Anglophone Canada. He has always been presented to us as a de luxe author who can be read but not staged]. As he would later relate, his solution to this situation, in which loyalty to one former colonial power compounds the inequalities caused by obedience to another, was to redeploy Shakespeare as a product of transnational culture. He believed that, by including performances at Montréal's Festival de Théâtre des Amériques (FTA) in the Cycle tour, he was allowing ‘the French-speaking public [to] discover a repertoire that it virtually never gets to see’, and thus he could bring global culture to Québec through Shakespeare. At the same time, by touring the Cycle – comprised of Coriolan, Macbeth and La Tempête – to numerous countries, he implicitly validated an outward-looking image of Québec while incidentally helping to ensure the viability of international Shakespeare theatre.

The tone of Lepage's comments actually seem, politically, rather moderate, considering that the Cycle's two-year tour overlapped with the highly charged political events of the early 1990s, events that harked back to Québec's nationalist movement of the 1970s in their divisive effect on Canadian federalism. In October 1992, shortly after the Paris run of the Cycle, Canadians voted in a bitterly debated referendum, rejecting the national government's Charlottetown Accord, which would have enshrined in the Constitution Québec's status as a distinct society within Canada. The following autumn, at the mid-point between the Montréal Cycle performances and the Québec City tour stop, the Bloc Québécois party, newly formed to defend Québec's interests, became the official opposition in Parliament, sitting across the floor from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a man disliked by many Québécois for his strong centralizing approach to federalism. Within two years, Canada seemed poised to come apart: in September 1994, Québec's provincial government promised to hold a referendum on negotiating sovereignty from Canada; one year later, Québec voters turned down this proposal by a margin of only 1 per cent.