Adelaide Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 13 Mar 2014
The house lights came up. The announcement was made. The show was cancelled. A technical hitch had glitched out a highly technical production on its Adelaide Festival opening night.
The audience had been in an existential otherworld when it stopped.
They were spellbound by a cube suspended centre stage in the Dunstan Playhouse. It was presented as a seedy little Paris hotel room which turned and pivoted and, with video projections and a haunt of jazz music, transformed itself into a streetscape, a recording studio...
It dominated a wonderful, extraordinary, very different piece of theatre, one delivered by the Canadian company Ex Machina and which told a tale of Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis. Its narrative emerged as if from the memories infused into the walls of the hotel room. This was the room once occupied by Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It passed on to the young Juliette Greco with whom the American jazz musician, Davis, was to fall in love but then refuse to marry because of the racial tensions of the day.
In the now, the hotel room is occupied by a Quebecois actor, in Paris to do voiceovers for a documentary on Juliette Greco - and also to lick the wounds of his own broken relationship. He chooses the room because of its history.
The room hangs - a surreal entity in the blackness of the stage.
At the beginning, it is a cube which sparkles and illuminates Cocteau line drawings and filmic credits for the play. And then, the character of Robert, the French Canadian actor, soars on wires and there it is, a mean little low-budget room. And the room pivots and becomes a package from which Cocteau may sprout, delivering his Lettre aux Americains. Again and again, the floating cube changes angles and the performers defy gravity to inhabit it.
At the same time, its core identity as the cheap hotel room grows in familiarity and purgatorial intensity. One's heart belongs to the commonality of Robert's lonely pain therein.
Needles and Opium is the revived early work of writer and director Robert Lepage, he who brought to the 1998 festival that vividly memorable work, The Seven Streams of the River Ota.
This work has an autobiographical string along with a rich counterflow of poetry, philosophy and music. It delivers the character of Jean Cocteau, his art, his words, his association with opium. It brings forth Miles Davis, who introduced bebop to Paris, and his flame, the lovely bohemian singer, Juliette Greco.
Among the exquisite and extraordinary scenes Lepage depicts in Needles and Opium is that of the trombonist being captured by Greco's performance through the basement window of a nightclub. Black and white, window bars and shadows, the visiting musician an outsider looking in. Music to music. Black and white. French and American.
Lepage uses myriad ingenious aesthetic and technical devices through the production. He uses the tinny amplification of telephone voice to play with immediacy and distance. Ditto language problems with switchboard girls. He injects irony and humour along with spectacle and artistry.
The lighting of Bruno Matte is sublime. The room which gives so many views is a masterpiece of theatre design from Carl Fillion - albeit, somewhere in its technical sophistication, it let us down - or, more precisely, left us in the air.
The play was almost three quarters in when it stopped on opening night. To come were the subjects of its title - the experiences of opium and needles in the lives of the characters living and dead.
Miles Davis was depicted by a Toronto-based gymnast and dancer called Wellesley Robertson III and already the audience had sampled his power and agility. His big drug dance scene was to come - and so much, crucially more, from the lovely Quebecois star, Marc Labreche so elegant, understated and poignant in the role of Robert.
Yet, the evening incomplete, the audience left with a sense of wonderment and delight. It had been an exceptional experience. Darkly ethereal.
In the added drama of its cancellation, it had become historic as well as memorable.
It had been another privileged dip into the mind's eye of one of the world's great theatre art practitioners.
There is a particular pace to Lepage productions. Just as the cube is somewhere, nowhere in space, the action is measured so that it suspends in time. And, for a play which is borne of the existentialist experiences, it is perfect.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 16 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
