A Hans-down triumph

Robert Lepage's exquisite, new solo show, which blends computer graphics, video, musical tracks and realism, brilliantly plays upon the idea of solitariness in theme and performance. Lepage dominates the stage as writer, director and actor of parts - one of them young and female - changing sex and costume at break-neck speed.

Andersen's life and his darkest fairy tales, The Dryad and The Shadow, prove far more the stimulus than the subject of this imaginative meditation on outsiders' experience of love and loneliness, secrecy and sexual identity, viewed from romantic and postmodern perspectives.

Lepage's flair for running several narratives on different tracks, or on parallel lines until they are persuasively brought together, has rarely been managed with such thematic conviction or to such emotionally charged effect.

The Andersen Project's locale is late-19th-century Paris, as visited by Hans Christian for the World Fair, and Paris today. The literal and spiritual link-man between these two epochs is a young Quebecois lyric writer commissioned by the Opera Garnier to write the libretto for a children's opera inspired by Andersen's fairy tales.

Alone in the city, his Quebec apartment exchanged with that of a Parisian who leaves his dog to be cared for, the lyricist's only human contact is the Opera House's deceitful administrator.

Meanwhile, in the mind's eye of the writer, Andersen's psychologically slanted allegorical stories of longing and transference are brought to dreamy dramatic life on stage: the Dryad's life-size tree shrinks to toy-like size when transported to Paris. Lepage discovers affinities, correspondences and connections uniting these ambitious, reclusive men and a African refugee graffiti artist with a secret.