The Seven Streams of the River Ota

by Robert Lepage and others (Ex Machina)

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 6 March 2020

In contrast to the short plays currently featured at several theatres (the Bridge, the Donmar, the Orange Tree), Robert Lepage brings one of his sprawling epic productions to the Lyttleton for only eight performances - not surprising as the performance lasts for just over seven hours (including two intervals and a longer break - perhaps five and a half acting hours all told).

The free program provides a list of actors but no list of characters, and notes on various topics relevant to the play - the atomic bombs at the close of the Second World War and the subsequent US occupation of Japan; the Theresienstadt concentration camp; Madame Butterfly; the World Expo held in Osaka in 1970; Georges Feydeau; Yukio Mishima; Abbott and Costello; and the Butō dance tradition in Japan. From this wide-ranging list can be gleaned something of the scope of the play, which is divided (of course) into seven acts, starting in Hiroshima in 1945, moving to New York in 1965, Osaka in 1970, Amsterdam in 1985, and Hiroshima again in 1986, 1995 and 1999. These too are not listed in the program, but their number, name, location and date is projected at the start of each section.

I mention these logistical peripheral facts because the absence of a conventional cast-list, and of explicit indications of setting, contribute to the overall effect of the piece, which relies heavily on a self-consciously slow style, gradually building a world in which profound issues of humanity in the twentieth century can be illustrated without overt preachiness or exposition. As one of my near-neighbours in the auditorium remarked, the audience is invited to reach its own conclusions, and to do some solid imaginative and intellectual work to achieve an understanding of what it is witnessing. It's very refreshing to be treated in such an adult way.

The enormity of the devastation in Hiroshima in 1945 is exemplified in the situation of a young widow secluded in her house by the River Ota, looked after by her grief-stricken mother-in-law and occasionally being visited by her blinded five-year-old daughter. An American military photographer under orders to make a record of physical damage in the city meets the widow, whose face we never see; but his momentary gasp of horror is all we need to know, even as a warily courteous encounter leads to increasing respect and intimacy. From this encounter, resonant of but far less cynical than the encounter between Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, all else in the play devolves, asthe blind daughter provides the most consistent link between the subsequent acts. The versatile set begins as the verandah of a Japanese house, with paper screens concealing or revealing various rooms, but wonderfully represents a down-at-heel New York apartment, various places in Osaka, and a cafe and apartment in Amsterdam, while an inventive use of mirrors evokes the stultifying uniformity and dread of Theresienstadt in perhaps the least convincingly linked episode, which nevertheless vitally expands the overall vision presented by Lepage.

After the opening act, steeped in ritual courtesy on the woman's part, and innate decency on the man's, there is a more abrasive episode in New York in which the hustle and bustle of 60's life is cleverly encapsulated by concentrating on the comings and goings in the bathroom shared by the occupants of several apartments; for some of these people their lives will be intertwined for many years. A brilliant evocation of the chaos of Expo '70 presented as a variation on a Feydeau farce (the Quebeçois delegation is performing one of his lesser works at the Exposition) precedes an overwhelmingly sad meeting of many of the major characters in Amsterdam fifteen years later, probably the most emotionally intense part of the piece, even granted the horrors alluded to both in Japan and in Nazi-occupied Europe. The fiftieth anniversary of the bombings in 1995 does not go so well for the diplomat and his now ex-wife whom we met in Osaka in 1970, but four years later again, in 1999, as a young Canadian man comes to Japan seeking insight through Butō the cultural exchange between East and West mutates once more in a tender and poignant finale: a foreigner in a boat being ferried across the bay just as the photographer was at the beginning.

There is so much to respond to in this intricate and compelling story; it wears its length very lightly because this provides the breathing space necessary to make all the connections without feeling rushed or browbeaten by too much information or too much symbolism. Beautifully paced, by turns intense, comic, irritating, uplifting (just like life in general), it is a fantastic thing to have witnessed.