EX MACHINA / ROBERT LEPAGE
www.lacaserne.net
Text: | Robert Lepage |
Direction: | Robert Lepage |
Assistan Director: | Normand Bissonnette |
Cast: | Marc Labrèche and Wellesley Robertson III |
One night in 1949, on the plane bringing him back to France, Jean Cocteau writes his Lettre aux Américans 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, 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, Julliette Greco opens her arms to him. Forty years later, at the Hotel La Louisiane, in Paris, a lonely Québécois tries in vain to forget his former lover. His emotional torments echo Cocteau’s dependence on opium and that of Davis on heroin. There begins a spectacular withdrawal experience showing the desperate effort of a man looking inwards in order to vanquish the pain and liberate himself from his addiction to love.
Through highly visual staging, as much magic as it is theatre, Robert Lepage revisits Needles and Opium 20 years after its first production. A new and striking scenography, original images, and an acrobat onstage complement Cocteau’s words and Marc Labrèche’s sensitive and ingenious performance. The result is a production with mesmerising effects whose world premiere was held on September 17th, 2013, at Le Trident, in Quebec, Canada.