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| Roc Brynner. |
Roc (later, Rock) Brynner, son of famed actor Yul Brynner,
wrote and starred in this one-man play based on French
playwright/poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s 1927 hospital cure of opium addiction.
Brynner had played the work at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1969. To John J.
O’Connor, Brynner was “competent’ and “sometimes less,” but others thought him
oddly attractive, like his father, and gifted with a strange charisma despite his
lack of professional polish. Reportedly, he was so disillusioned by his
experience with this work that, not having a natural affinity for acting, he
abandoned the theatre to become a writer and historian.
Clive Barnes appreciated Opium
as a “fascinating” trip in Cocteau’s spiritual and physical travail and for
its unusual insights into the nature of the drug, but most of the other critics
rejected it as being over-romanticized, dull, repetitious, and banal.