Robert Lepage has revisited a solo show he created in 1991 and, even without his physical presence, this two-man version strikes me as one of his wittiest and most haunting works. Based on the fact that in 1949 Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis paid their first visits, respectively, to New York and Paris, it features a third figure, Robert, who 40 years later finds himself similarly caught between two worlds.
Suspension, both literal and metaphorical, is the key to the piece. The action is set in a rotating, open-sided cube that becomes, variously, a Paris hotel room, a jazz club, a recording studio. Cocteau hovers in the air, like a Gallic Peter Pan, while writing a journal about New York. Davis, at one point, rolls down the slanted wall of the cube into the waiting arms of his lover, Juliette Gréco, in a bath beneath. But the pivotal figure is Robert who, numbed by the desertion of his lover, finds himself in Paris dubbing a bilingual commentary on a film about his existentialist heroes.
Cultural history blends with a study of the addiction of love laced with wry humour: one of the funniest, saddest scenes shows Robert making a desperate phonecall to his distant lover while listening to the orgasmic cries of a couple in the adjoining hotel room. The solitude of drug dependence is also caught in an astonishing sequence where a distraught Davis, back in New York, lies on the ground extending an outflung arm to a back-projected image of a needle.
A whole world is evoked through the combination of adroit technology and live performance and, even if Marc Labrèche lends Cocteau a sometimes impenetrable French accent, he catches perfectly Robert’s blend of spiritual desolation and impatient professionalism when dealing with incompetent co-producers in the dubbing studio. His acrobatic agility is matched by that of Wellesley Robertson III, who gives Davis the aura of a bereft genius. I’ve sometimes felt that Lepage’s visual brilliance outruns his ideas but here the two mesh perfectly in a symphony of loneliness and loss.
•At the Barbican, London, until 16 July. Box office: 0845-120 7511
