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Lolita Chakrabarti. Photo: Paul Clapp

Needles and Opium, Cottesloe Theatre (now Dorfman), National Theatre, 1992

I had been cast in my third job after RADA playing Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the National Theatre for Robert Lepage. Because I was so green, I didn’t know who he was. But friends said: "Oh my God! He’s a visionary genius." And his Needles and Opium was on in the Cottesloe so I went. I can’t remember the actual story because it’s 34 years ago but it totally blew me away; a one-man show that was a complete piece of theatre. As I remember it, Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau both connected to Paris. I think Davis was becoming addicted and falling in love and Cocteau was heartbroken and addicted, and this character named Robert – going through his own break-up – narrated it.

There was a screen used in many ways: as a backdrop and for projection. Not video but shadow play. He started to tell this story – he was very quiet, drawing you in – which was fascinating. The biggest things I remember were, firstly, a landscape, shadowed on to the screen behind him, and at some point he went behind it and started to dismantle the landscape and then built all the shapes into a trumpet. It was so stunning. There was a similar thing with a syringe and a needle which was suddenly huge on the screen.

And then, while he was gently talking, behind the screen he suddenly started to dive and begin to swim. I don’t know how it was done – total sleight of hand – but he just swam across the screen. It was like magic.

I was 22 and I’d never seen anything like it. Not just the staging, it was the interwoven story that constantly surprised: you didn’t know where it was going. You were led by the hand – it was gorgeous. He was so unassuming, there was nothing flashy about it. He drew you into the storytelling and made all these different things happen.

It was probably the first time I saw something that made you part of the storytelling. I know the audience always is, but this was so imaginative and so different it created a different flavour of theatre which I’ve definitely taken with me. I like stuff that flows, keeping the action moving and making the audience keep up with you. What I saw there demanded a lot of me: the difference between just sitting there and leaning forward with excitement, not even knowing why. That’s what I’m aiming for in my writing and I saw it in that show.

Analysis - David Benedict

A giant of Canadian theatre, multi-award-winning director, writer and performer Robert Lepage has encompassed everything from appearing in Denys Arcand’s film Jesus of Montreal to directing the premiere of Lorin Maazel’s opera of 1984 at the Royal Opera House and a Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera to creating Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas show KÀ, but he is most highly regarded for his own mesmerising, multidisciplinary stage productions poised between performance and playwriting.

His 85-minute solo piece Needles and Opium brought two separate stories together: that of American trumpeter and composer Miles Davis who stayed in Paris in 1949 and French artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s almost simultaneous trip to America. Both men were dealing with addiction and their stories were held together by Lepage’s story, four decades later, of a Québécois actor, ’Robert’, in a Paris hotel room once inhabited by Jean-Paul Sartre. His distress over a painful break-up mirrored the agonies and ecstasies of Cocteau and Davis.

The theatrical wizardry that defined and coursed through later, grander-scale masterworks like The Seven Streams of the River Ota and The Far Side of the Moon was already in full flight. He held audiences enthralled by using everything from music to vividly suggestive projections via acrobatics within a flying harness. Although he was the sole actor, he and a crew mastered virtuoso vertigo sequences to create drama in multiple dimensions.