The Far Side of the Moon opened at Canadian Stage on Saturday evening.  It’s a Robert Lepage production; written, designed and directed by him.  It’s very Lepage with the strengths and weaknesses one might expect.  We will come to that in more detail.  It’s a homage to Lepage’s childhood obsession with the US and Soviet space programmes and to the moon in general.  It plays out in two parallel narratives; the space programmes from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975 and the tale of two brothers in Quebec City circa late 1990s.  The older is an introverted nerd working on a doctoral thesis about popular perceptions of the space programmes and narcissism.  The younger brother is a presenter for the Weather Channel and is shallower than the water over Dogger Bank at low spring tide.  Their mother has just died and they are clearing out her apartment in an Old People’s Home.

The schtick, so very Lepage, is that all the characters are played by one actor, Olivier Normand, with a bit of help from puppeteer Eric LeBlanc.  And there’s a super high tech set with a wall to wall mirror that can be raised, lowered and have it’s angle of reflection varied and there are sliding panels one of which contains the door of a front loading washer which also serves as an airlock, a plane window and so on.  There’s also very elaborate lighting and complex sound design including a lot of original music by Laurie Anderson.

It’s necessarily episodic.  Normand delivers monologues or has conversations with characters we don’t see; either on the phone or in one case with a barman who apparently has never heard of the moon landings.  The intervals between are given over to documentary footage about the various space missions or balletic puppet sequences.

When it’s good it’s very good.  Normand’s performance is quite extraordinary and there are some very funny scenes.  We have the older brother, having failed to defend his thesis, invited to a conference in Moscow where he manages to miss his own presentation.  There is a scene where he is phone canvassing for Le Soleil and finds himself on the line with his ex girlfriend.  There’s a flashback where he stuffs his younger brother into a laundry drier.  There’s a fair bit of satire around dysfunctional Quebec health care and so on.  It even occasionally gets poetic as in a scene about star gazing on the Plains of Abraham.

The trouble is the pacing.  It’s very slow and a rather slender story line is spun out over two hours without an interval.  Part of this, unsurprisingly, is because Lepage seems a bit obsessed with the technology at his disposal and is determined to show us what it can do.  Shades of the Met Ring cycle here I think.  To be fair, it does some cool things.  The mirror allows for some interesting space walk type choreography and sometimes things we can’t quite see, like a character in the washing machine, are relayed to us as giant projections.  So there’s a lot to like but it feels a bit self indulgent.  Maybe that’s deliberate and we ought to expect it in a play that’s basically about a guy writing a thesis about narcissism.

The Far Side Side of the Moon runs at the Bluma Appel Theatre until November 16th.

Photo credits: Li Wang, courtesy of Shanghai Jing_an Theatre Festival