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This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
–14. A number of other critics have argued that in 1611 it was Ireland rather than America which was at the centre of English colonial debate. See Paul Brown, ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Ackowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism , ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985
published in the 1990s and early 2000s by Anglophone scholars grounded in cultural materialism (including myself), questioned the critical nature of Lepage’s engagement with representational practices. Considering his work through the lens of postmodern theory, Jen Harvie argued that the characteristic textual openness of Lepage’s productions ‘highlights and leaves volatile and problematic its representational practices but … does not explicitly engage in political debate’ (‘Robert Lepage’, 228). Lepage’s postmodernity, for Harvie, ‘prioritise[s] pleasure at the expense