ABSTRACT
For Lepage – and this is the crucial twist in his thinking – the perception of the playwright’s humanist genius does not trigger protectionist reverence but rather offers enormous scope for contemporary creative intervention. For all this seeming solecism, and for all the productions’ interpretative bravado, however, there remains legible in all of Lepage’s Shakespeare stagings a strain of conservatism, or perhaps timidity: they still tell their familiar stories and keep characters intact and recognisable. This is far from wholesale deconstruction. Shakespeare is clearly a master to Lepage, or perhaps a parent, to be both deferred to and rebelled against – a theme suggesting the play that haunts his creative imagination, Hamlet, which Lepage has described as a channel for his personal filial anxieties.
