In Eonnagata three maverick performers join forces in pursuit of an elusive historical enigma. Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage and Russell Maliphant, the show’s co-creators, all play the Chevalier d’Éon in different phases and aspects of his/her scandalous international career. Combining Kabuki-inspired dance-drama, physical theatre and technical wizardry, Eonnagata explores the multiple personalities and personae of the diplomat, spy and infamous cross-dresser who fooled Catherine the Great, but was eventually trapped by her/his own virtuosic masquerade.
Alexander McQueen’s costumes provide a fluidly sculptural playground, where fan-play fuses with swordplay, and the sartorial formalities of Louis Quinze and traditional Kabuki collide. Maliphant births himself from the cocoon of a golden kimono, only to be re-absorbed by its rapaciously sensuous embrace. Guillem has a thrilling solo in which letter-writing becomes duelling, her long Japanese sleeves first doing duty as parchment, then whirling though the air in desperate billows of self-concealment. The slow-motion sequence in which her male-garbed Chevalier is forcibly parted from her masculine attire and identity is harrowing in its poignant simplicity. Lepage is noticeably and inevitably slow-footed by comparison with his co-creators when all three dance in unison, but alone he moves with commanding grace, inhabiting the crumbling facade of the ageing d’Éon with paradoxical dignity and gravitas.
A set of screens keeps re-enacting Jove’s vengeful severance of the sexes, sundering partners as well as scenes, and sometimes fracturing the show’s subtle chain of allusive symbols in the process. Some passages of monologue also obtrude inelegantly, curtailing as well as illuminating the possible meanings of d’Éon’s convoluted biography (especially since they aren’t always wholly audible from the higher levels of the theatre).
Eonnagata is a diffuse, episodic and sometimes meandering meditation upon identity and gender, with moments of painful intensity interspersed with passages of narrative obscurity. The closing movement of the drama, in which d’Éon’s reflection upon his/her own life is playfully relayed through some magical mirror trickery, lends a welcome coherence to a stylish, beguiling and courageous, if occasionally bewildering, creative collaboration.
