Family feuds lost in space

It is two years since London first saw Robert Lepage direct and act his extraordinary one-man show about loss and liberation - a literal and metaphysical journey into space.

The Barbican revival of this beautiful, apparently autobiographical meditation, inspired by the death of the author's mother, is diminished by the fact that Lepage has ceded the performer's role to Yves Jacques.

Sadly, Jacques's underprojected performance, with words, phrases and sentences sometimes smudged, swallowed or fading out, never captures the quality of resentment and tension with which Lepage endowed the play's two feuding brothers.

Nor does the actor make these siblings two sharply different people. Yet although Jacques is no substitute for Lepage, the new Far Side Of The Moon made more of an emotional impact on me than in 2001.

The stage design, with a huge rear mirror above a grey back wall and mobile, sliding panels, looks deceptively mundane. In the play's astonishing first moments, Philippe, a failed scientist with an incomplete PhD thesis and a fascination for what lies or lives beyond the Earth, stares at clothes that spin round in a washing machine.

Opening the circular glass door, which, true to Lepage's startling visual imagination, later becomes a goldfish bowl, clock and plane porthole, he magically slips through the aperture and freefloats into outer space.

This surreal incident or imaginative flight launches a play whose newsreel images of the two superpowers competitively firing rockets and men into space for their own narcissistic glory, is matched by the personal rivalry and reconciliation of romantic, Russianloving Philippe and his materialist, quasi-American brother.

The cue for Philippe's dreamlike journey, on which eeerie, miniature creatures join up with him, is bereavement. For The Far Side Of The Moon, to which Laurie Anderson's extraterrestrial music provides an accompaniment, begins shortly after the death of his adored mother.

Lacking emotional ties, except for frail linkage to his gay brother, a materialistic, TV weather forecaster, the scientist realises the death of parents is the "ultimate vertigo".

Yet the loss alerts him to the potential of life beyond the horizon and, literally and figuratively, to new worlds. The final dazzling, trompe l'oeil image of Philippe drifting through space, to the appropriate music of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, conveys his dream of escapist flight come true.

The Far Side Of The Moon (Ex Machina)