Comunidad de Madrid
Comunidad de Madrid
Comunidad de Madrid

Needles and Opium

EX MACHINA / ROBERT LEPAGE
www.lacaserne.net

  • Theatre
  • Spanish premiere
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English & French (with Spanish subtitles)
  • Approximate length: 1 hour and 35 minutes (no intermission)
  • Year of production: 2013
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.

Ticket sale

Venue, dates and schedule

  • Teatros del Canal, Sala Roja
  • March 7th, 9th, & 10th, 2015, 8 pm
  • March 8th, 2015, 6 pm
About the play

Vídeo

The critics have said…

  • ‘All the elements that form the Lepage alphabet are present. Boldness, magic, fascination, humour, poetry, intelligence and an ingenious use of technology. (…) A memorable and mesmerising show’.
    YVES LECLERC, JOURNAL DE QUÉBEC
  • ‘A powerful text, a striking scenic device, another clever creation by Robert Lepage’.
    MARTINE CÔTÉ, LE HUFFINGTON POST - QUÉBEC
  • ‘A fortunate hypnosis. (…) Needles and Opium takes us for a ride to weightlessness. (…) Lepage’s humour is interpreted by Labrèche with extreme precision’.
    JOSIANNE DESLOGES, LE SOLEIL