A Far-out piece of theatre

Ask any regular theatre-goer which show they enjoyed most in 2001 and the chances are they will say The Far Side Of The Moon. If, that is, they managed to see it at all: it only ran for ten performances.

A wondrous solo piece by Robert Lepage, it told the story of two very different brothers brought together over a goldfish following the death of their mother, against a childhood backdrop dominated by the first moon landings in 1969.

Lepage - a world-class experimental director - conceived the show both in response to his own mother's death and to explore his personal fascination with space travel. It was the latter that made the piece - few people who saw it will forget the way Lepage's dramatic alchemy transformed a washing machine into a space ship, his elegiac sense of man alone in the cosmos; or the final poetic image of Lepage floating in space.

But enough talk in the past tense: the good news for everyone is that The Far Side Of The Moon is coming back.

Being the international superstar that he is, Lepage couldn't commit this time round to a lengthy tour.

Instead, a fellow Canadian, Yves Jacques, has been touring in his place.

To step into Lepage's shoes is a momentous task, given the auteur's formidable reputation, but the deeply personal nature of the show can't have helped much, either.

'I was walking on eggshells at first,' says Jacques, who starred with Lepage in Denys Arcand's film Jesus Of Montreal and who appears in Arcand's forthcoming new movie The Barbarian Invasions.

'Originally I thought I couldn't change a comma. But I soon found my own story in it. Everyone has someone close to them with whom they don't connect, for example. And everyone can relate to the metaphysical mysteries of outer space.'

Lepage's theatre work is famously improvised and collaborative, and many of his pieces take years to develop. Long periods spent working in intense proximity with other people on single productions, often trusting to little more than blind instinct, has cultivated a democratic notion of theatre that has little room for such things as ownership or egotism.

It is this that enabled him to let Jacques take over. 'Handing it to Yves proved the mettle of the show,' he says. 'At first his performance was a clone of mine, but now he's melted his own self into it.'