When Miles Davis met Jean Cocteau

Through highly visual staging, which is as much magic as it is theatre, Robert Lepage revisits Needles and Opium 20 years after its first production. Coming to Theatre Royal Plymouth November 7 and 8 and starring Olivier Normand and Wellesley Robertson III, these are the only UK performances on the current world tour.

The starting point for the story is one night in 1949, on the plane bringing him back to France, when celebrated poet and thinker Jean Cocteau writes his Lettre aux Américains in which fascination and disenchantment intertwine. He has just discovered New York, where he presented his most recent feature film, L’Aigle à deux têtes.

At the same time, jazz musician Miles Davis is visiting Paris for the first time, bringing bebop with him to the old continent. Parisian jazz fans are ecstatic.

As the notes of Je suis comme je suis linger in the air, actress and chanson singer Juliette Greco opens her arms to him. Forty years later, at the Hotel La Louisiane, in Paris, a lonely Canadian tries in vain to forget his former lover. His emotional torments echo Cocteau’s dependence on opium and Davis’s heroin addiction.

Using dramatic imagery and acrobatics, there begins a spectacular withdrawal experience where the words and drawings of the prince of poets and the blue notes of the exceptional jazzman accompany his leap into nothingness.

Robert Lepage, who created Needles and Opium in 1991, said of the 2018 production: “It wasn’t enough to just remount the play. I felt it was necessary to deepen it – and even finish writing it – because when dealing with feelings of love and relationship conflicts, there are things one only understands much later. Because of this, I believe that the current version has grown and matured significantly.”

Tickets are available at theatreroyal.com or 01752-267222. Concessions are available.