Reimagined 'Needles and Opium' comes to Seoul
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A scene from Robert Lepage's play "Needles and Opium," which will to be staged at LG Arts Center from Sept. 17 to 19. / Courtesy of LG Arts Center
Robert Lepage, director of “Needles and Opium” / Courtesy of LG Arts Center
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Canadian director Robert Lepage's "Needles and Opium," which combines imaginative theater with technological trickery, comes to the LG Arts Center in southern Seoul from Thursday to Saturday.
The play was premiered in 1991 and revolves around three men who have lost love ― French writer Jean Cocteau, African American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and Quebecois Robert, the alter ego of the director/actor ― and how they try to vanquish the pain of their broken hearts through addiction. It was acclaimed for its poetic and transformative exploration of art, love and addiction with a rotating cube suspended in midair designed by set designer Carl Fillion.
The very first idea for the play came from Cocteau's book "Letter to the Americans," said Lepage.
"It was very short and I thought it was interesting. When I started developing the project, I discovered that there were some historical coincidences about Miles Davis. In 1949, a European goes to America for the first time and an American goes to Europe for the first time. The journeys changed their lives and they were both connected to opium," the director said. "By chance, when I was working on it, I went through a breakup in my life, a painful one. So suddenly, I felt all these threads conformed to each other and the theme of addiction could maybe be elaborated in a broader sense."
The one to be staged at LG Arts Center later this week is a restaged version debuted in 2013. Lepage, who doesn't have a tendency to remount things, said it was actor Marc Labreche's idea to do it again.
"I thought it had aged a lot. When I saw it, I was surprised that the show had something to say about today. And I think the big difference what I wanted to do (in the new production) was not just to change the staging of it, but I wanted it to be more mature, because it’s a work that dates back to 25 years ago," Lepage said.
In the original production, Lepage played all three characters Cocteau, Davis and Robert. It was tricky for a white person to play a black character, so Davis appeared as a shadow and Lepage thought it made the part of Miles very thin.
"So I wanted to be 'incarnator' and that's why I asked Wellesley (Robertson III), who's an acrobat, to come. It is more interesting to work with an acrobat dancer and the voice of Davis' trumpet, which allowed me to create new scenes and put more flesh on the Davis scene," Lepage explained.
Lepage believes that theatrical works can be curative and that "Needles and Opium" is no exception.
"The more personal the work, the more the work is therapeutic. Instead of going to see a psychologist or a therapist, I prefer doing theater. Not that I want to bore people with my problems, contradictions or paradoxes, but I think that I understand myself better in my work than to sit with a psychologist. I think artistic creation involves a therapeutic part, as long as the audience doesn’t feel that they're looking at something that is self-indulgent or something that the audience should not feel therapeutic," the thespian said.
Labreche plays Cocteau and Robert, while Robertson III takes on the role of Davis.
Tickets cost 40,000 to 80,000 won. For more information, visit www.lgart.com or call (02) 2005-0114.