Must-See: Canadian Stage’s revamped version of the Robert Lepage hallucinatory classic, Needles and Opium
Needles and Opium, an early Robert Lepage triumph, has been making heads spin for decades. Here, a look at the play’s over-the-top iterations
The imaginary worlds Robert Lepage builds onstage are always as rich, complex and baffling as a dream. Theatre, he has said, “is a sensuous experience.” And so his shows aim for sensory overload. His Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, Kà—on now in Las Vegas and housed in a purpose-built pavilion at the MGM Grand hotel—features a massive flaming wheel of death and a floating stage that rises and falls over a 50-foot abyss. In Playing Cards: Spades, which was mounted at last year’s Luminato Festival, actors and props emerged from a glowing pit in the centre of the stage like spells from a cauldron. His notorious production of the Ring Cycle at the Met took place on a 41-tonne set, with 24 moving planks that morphed into forests and snowy mountains. This month, Canadian Stage mounts a revamped version of Needles and Opium, the show that helped make Lepage a theatre star in the early ’90s. Based on the drug-addled lives of Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau, and inspired in part by a week-long bad trip Lepage experienced in high school, the play is appropriately hallucinatory—at one point, an out-of-his-head Cocteau flies above the New York skyline like a junkie Mary Poppins. Lepage has gone bigger since Needles and Opium, but he’s never gone wilder.
Needles and Opium
By Robert Lepage
Bluma Appel Theatre
Nov. 22 to Dec. 1
Simon Lewsen is a feature writer and a regular contributor to Toronto Life, Maclean’s, the Walrus, Report on Business, and the Toronto Star. He writes the monthly City Beat column on art and architecture for Designlines, and he teaches writing at the University of Toronto.
