Robert Lepage is the Marquis de Sade. In pigtailed perruque and high heels, turning slowly in third position, like a dancer on a musical box. Lolling in a red velvet seat, as if he were in a vulva. Wearing a suit covered in his handwritten works: his heart on his sleeve, his mind on his crotch. Hyper-naked. Without clothes and without hair. Gleaming from top to toe.
The magnetic centre of Quills
is this Lepage incarnation. Based on the script by Doug Wright that was used for the 2000 film of the same name starring Kate Winslet and Geoffrey Rush, the play looks at De Sade’s years in the Charenton asylum. It builds a story in which the marquis, forbidden to write what is considered dangerous filth, finds ways of continuing his endeavours. Various body fluids are pressed into service, as is the help of one of the asylum’s laundresses. Filth? Laundering? No metaphor is unmissed.
Any new work by Lepage, a stage wizard, is of extraordinary interest. Quills holds several surprises: it is based on someone else’s script; it is collaborative – Lepage co-directs with his fellow Canadian Jean-Pierre Cloutier – and it eschews much of the dazzle and melt that have seemed essential to Lepage’s work. There is no leaping between continents; no gliding between film and flesh, or strange shape-changing. In comparison to Lipsynch or The Far Side of the Moon, Quills looks modest at first.
Actually, it proves that Lepage’s gift is not to decorate but to explore. Are we in the Enlightenment or at the dawn of Romanticism? The talk is dark; but the stage is full of light. Bars of a cell gleam like fluorescent tubes. Walls are sometimes transparent, sometimes reflecting. You may see multiple Lepages, or you may look beyond the surface. A crowd of inmates is apparently trapped in a pillar, a column of disturbance.
Wright wrote his play in the mid-90s, in reaction to rows about “decency” and public funding of the arts in the US. Lepage and Cloutier began to be interested in the idea of bringing it to the stage when, under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canadian artists were feeling similarly censored. They determined to make a more mordant, free-wheeling, less doctrinaire version than the film. They have succeeded.
The movie came under attack for historical inaccuracies and for making De Sade into a censored martyr. The stage version does not look like a Sadeian apologia: it makes it clear that the marquis is a good test for censorship precisely because the value of his works and its effects are equivocal. The play is unlikely to be taken for documentary; it is an exultant fiction in which the marquis’s preoccupations are enlisted to tell his life story. Even I, unchristened, unchristian, winced at Jesus Christ copulating on the cross.
De Sade, who in fact died peacefully, is at the end of the play dismembered, his different parts tucked away into a collection of boxes. As the light fades from the stage, an orange glow lights up these receptacles, which take on an impudent life. Fingers wag; a long tongue curls. The French are right: De Sade was the first surrealist.
Quills is part of the annual Les Nuits de Fourvière, unusual among French festivals in that it doesn’t specialise in one art form: it puts on music and dance as well as theatre. Lyon is a resonant place for these illusions and truths. The city loves trompe-l’oeil: buildings are covered in deceptively exact portraits of citizens past and present. It is also a city of marvellously varied arenas. Where better to see a new-fashioned circus than in a Roman amphitheatre? Race Horse Company made extraordinary patterns in the air as they jumped over each other like parts of a broken-up jigsaw. As their show, Super Sunday, came to a close, a final, alarming act erupted: hundreds of green plastic discs hurtled towards the stage, as if in a mad frisbee competition. They were the plastic cushions on which the spectators had been sitting. Not very health and safety, but completely in accord with the whooping of the show. This is the Lyonnais way of showing enthusiasm. Now we are leaving the European Union, it’s unlikely to catch on at the National.
• Quills is at Les Nuits de Fourvière, Lyon, until 30 July
