Robert Lepage reflects on personal and collective memories of Quebec in ‘887’

TORONTO – Theatre maverick Robert Lepage jokes his upbringing in Quebec City in the 1960s was “a living metaphor of Canada.”

His adopted older brother and sister had attended English school in Nova Scotia, but he and his younger sister went to French school in Quebec, making for an even split of francophones and anglophones in the household.

“Compared to the other francophone kids we would hang out with we had X-ray eyes on … because we lived with English-speaking people and understood the language,” said the playwright/director/actor/filmmaker.

“My mother became more and more sympathetic to the separatist movement and my father was a very staunch federalist. He said, ‘No, you have to learn English.’

“So it was a very interesting place. Your political opinion would shift all the time.”

Lepage reflects on that period of his life, as well as Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, and questions the idea of personal and collective memory in his new play “887.”

The show makes its world premiere on Tuesday at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts as part of the Pan Am Games arts and cultural festival Panamania.

Lepage created and stars in the show as an actor who is trying to not only remember his lines for his job but also the memories of his life and the historical and social fabric of his upbringing.

He said this is the first time he’s been so blatantly autobiographical in his career, which has included an innovative staging of Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Metropolitan Opera and “The Nightingale and Other Short Fables,” a opera involving puppetry and orchestra pits filled with water.

“In this case, it’s really me and my family and my name,” he said.

The founder of the multidisciplinary production company Ex Machina said he embarked on the project after becoming “obsessed” with the role of memory — both in his career and also in his life as he and others around him have aged. (His paternal grandmother had Alzheimer’s.)

Reflecting on his childhood, he realized most of it was “false memory,” so he pored over old photo albums and spoke with his siblings to revisit past events.

Seeing the photos — some of which he projects during his show — gave him a new perspective on his childhood, as he saw details in the photos he’d never noticed before, he said.

Doing the show also highlighted similarities to his father, who was in the navy and stationed in Nova Scotia when he and Lepage’s mother adopted their first two children. They had Lepage and his younger sister when they moved back to Quebec City’s Montcalm district.

Lepage also started thinking about how younger generations in Quebec remember the past, and how the political and social memories of Canada and Quebec are taught and reflected in history books and newspapers nationwide.

“People forget that the whole separatist movement in Quebec was not a French-English thing when it started,” said Lepage.

“It became that at one point, but at the start it was a working-class struggle and it just happened that the poor class spoke mainly French and the upper class spoke English.”

He added: “But what that movement has become is something completely different … and I think it’s necessary to do a show about memory to say, ‘Well, remember where that idea came from?’”