Robert Lepage in Courville
© Christophe Raynaud de Lage
The name has since disappeared and Courville has been fused into a suburb that merged later on with Quebec City. But some remember what was distinctive about the place: its immediate vicinity to the Montmorency Falls, the highest in North America, and its Ordovician limestone subsoil that created a multitude of more or less giant caves outcropping under an uncertain surface.
Courville also recalls of a more ordinary reality: the Quebec suburbs of the 1970s and their now obsolete bungalows. And, by extension, the concerns of the time. The Cold War, which finds an outlet in exciting hockey tournaments between Canada and Soviet Russia. The sometimes trippy pop of progressive rock. The eternal national psychodrama in which French and English speakers clash, and which will soon be exacerbated. And the beginning of the end of what is called, at that time, the “nuclear family”, this sociological bubble where the mirages of consumption sometimes hide sordid relationships.
On November 15, 1975, Simon is 17 years old, has his own room in the basement of a pavilion in Courville, a widowed mother mixed up with a shifty uncle, an involuntary and painfully permanent tattoo on his chest, a female friend who woos him without much success and a male friend who is as clueless as he is athletic. The coming year will precipitate things, the social unrest that is gradually taking place will find dramatic and decisive echoes in the life of the young man.
Courville sketches the portrait of a complex adolescence, where the backdrop of collective euphoria cannot occult the torments of sexual awakening, the weight of the look of others or the obsession of appearances. Throughout the show, the ancestral technique of bunraku is used to bring life to puppets of all sizes that embody Simon and his entourage. On stage, Robert Lepage is the narrator of the story.
Premiere / First version with Robert Lepage:
19 September - 10 October 2021: Le Diamant, Quebec (QC, CA)
Premiere / New version with Olivier Normand:
24 - 26 March 2023: National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Kaohsiung (TW)
Written, designed and directed by
Robert Lepage
Design and Creative Director
Steve Blanchet
Assistant Director
Francis Beaulieu
Manipulation des marionnettes
Wellesley Robertson III
Caroline Tanguay
Martin Vaillancourt
Associate Set Designer
Ariane Sauvé
Puppet Design and building
Jean-Guy White
Céline White
Composer and Sound Designer
Mathieu Doyon
Image Designer
Félix Fradet-Faguy
Lighting Designer
Nicolas Descôteaux
Costume Designer
Virginie Leclerc
Properties Designer
Jeanne Lapierre
Production: Ex Machina
Co-production:
Le Diamant, Quebec City
Le Volcan, Scène nationale du Havre
La Comète - Scène nationale de Châlons-en-Champagne
National Taichung Theater, Taiwan
National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying), Taiwan
Théâtre du Nouveau monde, Montreal
Hong Kong Arts Festival
Producer for Ex Machina Michel Bernatchez
Associate Production - Europe and Japan Richard Castelli - Epidemic
Associate Production - The Americas, Asia (except Japan), Australia, NZ Menno Plukker Theatre Agent
Ex Machina is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Quebec's Arts and Literature Council
and the City of Quebec.
