The Andersen Project 2

Theatre The Andersen Project

Royal Danish, Copenhagen Mark Fisher Wednesday May 25, 2005 The Guardian

Five co-producers, three sponsors and five funding bodies are credited for Robert Lepage's new one-man show. By the standards of the globe-trotting Canadian this is modest. So it's all the more ironic that The Andersen Project is a satire of the very grant structures that keep him going. His central character is Frederic Watson, a rock lyricist drafted in for a collaboration between France, the UK, Denmark and his native Canada. The would-be director general of the Opéra Bastille, a man adept at raising cash from the EU but more concerned for his career than for art, has commissioned Watson to write an opera based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale. With breathless delivery and an accent that's pure Antoine de Caunes, Lepage creates a spot-on send-up of the 21st-century arts bureaucrat who'll jump from Beckett with the Irish to Andersen with the Danes as long as the money's there. Back in real life, the money is there to commemorate Andersen's 200th anniversary, courtesy of the Hans Christian Andersen 2005 Foundation, and Lepage uses his kroner to weave a story full of parallels between himself and the master taleteller. Like the tree spirit in Andersen's The Dryad who longs to see the excitement of Paris during the 1867 Great Exhibition, these are artists who seek to discover themselves in travel. And like the dryad, who dies wishing for less artificial pleasures, they find the new experiences only strengthen the pull of home. There's a suggestion, in the 19th-century whores and the 21st-century porno kiosks, that all this travelling is really a restless quest for sexual fulfilment. Also that the creative urge is a desire to escape from earthly torments: they teased Andersen for being ungainly, Watson for being albino and Lepage, by implication, for his alopecia.

Not all the parallels are yet fully developed, but The Andersen Project stands as a playful and dazzling ode to the imagination and an evening of storytelling worthy of Hans Christian himself.