Polygraph by Robert Lepage & Marie Brassard – Directed by Christos Lygas

Canada, some twenty years ago, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall: scraping through an unsolved murder becomes the thread that connects three people in subtle and overt ways.

Francois, is a young waiter once a suspect for the murder of a young woman. He was never told that he had indeed successfully passed a lie detector test, thus left in an constant ambivalent doubt.

David, is a German criminologist who found refuge in Canada in the turbulent years of the late 80s. He is the investigator who gave Francois the test, but not the results, and comes to confront his consciousness and his nightmares.

Lucy is a young actress that comes to connect the two men. She portrays for a movie the role of the actual murdered woman that bounded for ever Davis with Francois.

In the Polygraph, the past and the present are constantly intertwined on the stage intensifying the existential gridlocks of all three characters. They all connect with each other in ways that are equally erotic and torturous. The end of the story reflect in different and distinct ways for each character, the end of an era.

For Christos Lygas, director (and actor):

“Polygraph is a game of the reflections of truth. Aren’t, at the end, Theater, a Love Affair, the Games of Power, a Murder, the Political Fragmentation of a City, an Autopsy, a Lecture, an Interrogation, a Film, a Rehearsal, all share the common denominator of a Representation. Don’t we indeed write history through minor Representations with a beginnings and an end.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end; Devoutly to be wished To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” In Polygraph, Death looks as a piece of film exposed to light, and Darkness is diaphanous and translucent, wise as the Cold itself, wise a dream.”

Polygraph was written in 1997 and has met acclamation from critics and audiences alike in Canadian and British stages. It is a play that combines realism and embodiment on stage of the intense emotions of the characters with the extensive usage of video art.

The performance is not suitable for minors 13 years old or younger.