Dragon's long tale

With its 75-year span, encompassing seven time zones, four languages, three generations and two world wars, not to mention its five-and-a-half-hour running time, no one could accuse Robert Lepage's first major work of lacking ambition.

Created in 1985, when he was just 27, it established the reputation of the Quebec-based writer/ director and paved the way for monumental future creations such as Seven Streams of the River Ota.

Thus a fearsome, superlativeladen reputation preceded The Dragons' Trilogy, the first offering in the Barbican's Young Genius season. Epic is, however, an overused word: anything, even back-to-back episodes of Crossroads, will be accorded epic status by some if they last long enough.

Lepage and his five co-writers have come up with a baggy soap opera that winds its whimsical, anecdotal way around Canada, starting in Quebec and progressing via Toronto to 1980s Vancouver. An air of pseudo-oriental mysticism hangs unengagingly over the whole enterprise - the programme notes speak ominously of the "China of the imagination" as Lepage toys with ideas of East-West fusion and cross-cultural (mis)understanding.

The two protagonists are French-Canadians Françoise and Jeanne, whom we first encounter as teenagers in Quebec's Chinese quarter. They, like the other ragtag Caucasians, are fascinated by the opium-taking, mah jongplaying world of Mr Wong's laundry. It is in a gambling session here that the fate of the pregnant, unmarried Jeanne is settled.

Simone Chartrand and Véronika Makdissi-Warren age convincingly as Françoise and Jeanne. As much as the frustratingly ethereal script allows, they impel us to care about them, moving through births, marriages and fatal illnesses, not to mention forays into 1945 Japan and Mao-era China.

The other six cast members take on a dizzying variety of roles, with special commendation going to Emily Shelton for her portrayal of three generations of the same Japanese family.

The Barbican Theatre has been entirely reconfigured, with two banks of (extremely uncomfortable) seats facing each other across a giant gravel pit of a playing area and overhung by awkwardly positioned screens for surtitles.

There are arresting t'ai chi-influenced tableaux and impressive sound effects, but the evening's loveliest moment is a simple song. Françoise, now a member of the Women's Army Corps, stands high on a platform and sings hauntingly of "Yukali", a place so magical it can't exist.

This, it seems, is what Lepage thinks of the Orient, a fuzzy notion that makes his dragons overlong and overrated.

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The Dragon's Trilogy