Faith, money, war and love: Robert Lepage's new show opens at Schaubühne

A conversation with Robert Lepage, soft-spoken raconteur, actor, writer and director, has a gentle effervescence; his playful leaps of association betray his great delight in the world’s many surprises.

As an emerging theatremaker in his native Quebec, he founded the experimental theatre troupe Ex Machina, which has taken on Shakespeare and Chinese culture alike. He has since designed shows for Cirque du Soleil and directed multiple operas, including his technologically-ambitious Ring Cycle at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. His autofictional 887 as well as his meditation on Japan after Hiroshima, The Seven Streams of the River Ōta, have toured globally.

Honoured in 2022 as the Schaubühne FIND Festival’s Artist-in-Focus, this September he is originating his first work for the Berlin theatre, Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe (“Faith, money, war and love”), an exploration of Germany’s postwar history through four scenarios – all of which began with a form of play.

Lepage handed his actors a deck of cards, with each suit coded as one of the four central themes, and they began improvisations based on what they drew. The final performance is what emerged from these improvisations – from the mistakes, from the epiphanies, from Lepage’s unique process of creating theatre.

You began the project by handing out a deck of cards to your actors. Why use that as a framework?

It’s a toy. It’s a starting point object. I always avoid starting with themes – I never impose [them]. I never impose messages. I never say, “Well, let’s do a show about this.” Never, ever. It’s always the result of a playful process, and playful also in a serious fashion. It’s having fun, but it’s also very dramatic.

The show is alive and the show will tell us what to do.

So the thematic lines appear during the process, and they become very obvious, and [I] become very obsessed by those things. And those things are incarnated by characters, of course, who emerge from this process. It’s tricky – this is my second interview, so I don’t have these ready-made answers to give you, which is good, but at the same time, I’m kind of discovering what it [the play] is doing.

What is this process like for the actors?

In late June last year, [Schaubühne artistic director] Thomas [Ostermeier] told me, “We’d like you to do a show for us – but we don’t want you to do a play with a script. Do what you do, and we’ll give you the means to work the way you work.” Which is very generous on his part. But it meant that the way we rehearsed would be very different from Schaubühne’s structured schedule. He said to me, “I’m going to select 10 actors in the company that I feel are adventurous enough to start from scratch.”

So we met here for the first time – we had a five-day workshop – and I selected seven actors out of those 10 actors. They’re all going, “So what’s the script, what’s the theme, what’s the starting point, what’s the vision?” [I said,] “Didn’t Thomas tell you that we’re starting from scratch?” And they all freaked! So I go, “Oh, okay, all right, don’t worry. By the end of this week, there’ll be a few threads.”

And we improvised, we played games – the usual way that I work. And they were all very surprised that they could actually do that, that they’re interesting writers, that they have interesting stories to tell. And very often in this process, you don’t do what you usually [would], because an actor is usually cast; a middle-aged woman plays either an old prostitute or she plays the mother or whatever. You’re typecast even though you work for a company that’s very liberal and open-minded, like the Schaubühne.

But in this context, you do stuff that would never be offered to you. I call them bottomless pits in the sense that when you improvise a situation, [maybe] you play a waiter, and then after that, you do the same improv, and you play the client. We change, and we shift from that, but then you end up doing something you never thought that you could do, and you have endless things to say about that character, about that topic – so we keep that. I try to identify these bottomless pits. It’s not a very elegant word (laughs).

The show tackles German history. Did you know that going in, or did that develop with the actors?

Whatever we produce in September would have been completely different if one cast member had been different. I try to work from the sculpting matter that you have – that’s what you have to do. And they’re brilliant actors, fantastic actors, and they have all this stuff that they want to say and they’re very opinionated.

So it’s not just do this, do that. It’s really, we sit and we debate and then we go and we debate again. It’s a more interesting way to work, because you don’t do any compromise. Usually, if you do a collective work, you have to take into account who the people are and their social rank, or their gender, their political affiliations, their social values, whatever. If you started with a theme, well, you’re fucked, because then you have to adjust it. But because there’s nothing when we start, the thing that we deserve to be discussing together will show up at some point, and that’s what happens.

It’s really interesting. This show is a lot about Germany, which is really cool, because as somebody from North America, you think you know – and I’ve been here so many times, and I’m so interested in German culture – what it’s about. And of course, you discover you don’t know anything.

*Actor Christoph Gawenda, photo courtesy of the Schaubühne*

It seems like a lot of the process of creating this work reflects the experience of the audience watching theatre – in its emphasis on spontaneity and authenticity…

Being authentic also means involving something of your character. Each actor has a mystery, and it’s to reveal a bit of that in what you’re doing. It’s very pretentious what I’m going to say. What is acting? Acting is taking somebody’s script, and it’s the art of making the people believe that you are inventing the words. But what if you invented the words?

That’s why I say the acting is at another level – because you’re not saying somebody else’s script, you’re saying your thing – of course, agreed on by other people, it’s a consensus, but it came from the place that belongs to you. So that’s a different thing. And it’s not therapy. It’s not that. You’re asserting a purpose, a character, an idea, but, but it comes from your way of saying things and polished by, hopefully, (laughs) a good German translator.

Actors go to a place very often that they’ve never been. So of course, they get a sense of adventure, of mise en danger. Because there’s no real creation if you don’t put yourself at risk.

Fate or chance is obviously a big part of the production itself. But how does luck feature in creating a work like this?

I think a lot of things are by chance, but it’s what you do with it that makes you a good artist. And the thing is, coincidence doesn’t exist. An example from the second day of rehearsal – cards contain so many themes, and one of them is, of course, stupid card tricks, magic. And we’re out of time, so I go, okay, Damir, one of the actors, tomorrow we’ll look at the character of the magician.

I say, I know a few card tricks, I’ll prepare them. And the day after he comes in – and he’s a fucking magician! So we step back and he has all these things – and [for the trick] you write to him, and then suddenly, oh, the card’s in the bottle! He’s a fucking magician. He did that in the past life. It’s not a coincidence. It’s something that you channel and it’s there. And that happened the whole process. The show is alive and the show will tell us what to do.