It’s cold where our knowledge thins out: on the moon’s far side, and in the void between people … especially those who think they know each other. Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon, now playing at Canadian Stage’s Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto, turns that chill into theatre: bracing, crystalline, and in its austerity, thrilling.
Lepage premiered this solo work in 2000, and for a quarter-century it has orbited the international stage, acclaimed for its inventiveness and emotional intelligence. The creator-director’s long collaboration with company Ex Machina set the foundational template of multimedia precision married to human-scale inquiry. In the play’s current iteration, performed by Olivier Normand, the show’s focus remains resonant: on the Cold War’s space race as a mirror to the colder estrangements at home.
The premise is simple and sly. Two brothers—Philip, the rumpled philosopher-searcher, and André, the weatherman with the sheen of commercial success—drift through parallel lives, touching and ricocheting, but seldom docking. Around them, the US–Soviet race to the moon and beyond unspools in images and artefacts. The production asks us to read those trajectories against each other, without spelling out “what happens.” It engineers perspective: the same object, viewed from inside and from outside, becomes a different story.
Normand anchors everything. He is the brothers with their two distinct gravities, and he shapeshifts into a constellation of others: an officious airline agent, a lab tech, an academic colleague, a bureaucrat, mission control. The physical demands are continuous and exacting: split-second transitions, micro-calibrated posture and breath, and prop work that transforms function and hits camera and light at precise angles.
Normand delivers a stunning performance that is technically exquisite: funny in its detail, melancholy in its undertow, and crucially, cold. He occupies one consciousness at a time, speaking into the air left by absent interlocutors. That solitude, against the simple, shifting backdrop of technology and lighting, is the point: a gestural proof that conversation, like a life blinkered by the objects in the foreground, can be architecture without occupants.
Lepage’s cinematic vision is the reason this remains an extraordinary theatrical experience. The mutable set is not scenic wallpaper: it is the show’s nervous system. Everyday technologies—a washing machine, an MRI, a rocketship, even a fishbowl—are repurposed as lenses. Screens slide; mirrors pivot; a panel becomes a window becomes a horizon line. Projections and live camera work recompose images so we are forever toggling between exterior and interior views. The drum of a washer becomes a porthole. The hum of medical imaging becomes a cosmic scan.
The set’s constant morphing mediates the story and instructs how we look. Perspective is both choice and constraint … and The Far Side of the Moon never lets you forget it.
This dramaturgy dovetails with the show’s central argument. Space is an alluring mystery to solve: beautiful in its emptiness, cold as dry ice. The space race, which we see recounted and wondrously re-enacted with puppets by Eric LeBlanc, is a cold war of parallel play across an ideological void, a competition that only very late in the game becomes collaboration. Likewise, Philip and André circle each other in a relationship that is gap-filled and distant. Lepage suggests that the space between us is as cold and vast as space itself, and we can only bridge it with an approach as enterprising as that of the cosmonauts and astronauts, that lifts us past our myopic belief that the other reflects us.
The final scene is spectacular: technically extraordinary, skillfully acted, brilliantly disorienting and metaphorically uplifting — and yet still as cold as space. The warmth is all ours: it flickers in the act of watching, in the moment we reframe what we think we see.
In the end, Lepage’s direction keeps sentiment at bay and rigor in the foreground: the show’s unrelenting chill is a virtue, a means of clarity. Normand’s angular, disciplined presence honours that ethos. Together, they build a theatre of precision in which technology is not alienation but inquiry. The provocation that lingers is blunt: if the moon’s far side exists mainly as a construct of instruments and inference, how many other “far sides” in our lives have we mistaken for absence?
Maybe the void isn’t empty at all. Maybe we’re looking from the wrong angle.
Ex Machina’s The Far Side of the Moon, presented by Canadian Stage, is at the Bluma Appel Theatre until November 16, 2025. Reserve tickets at canadianstage,com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
