Miles. – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Benjamin Akintuyosi and Jay Phelps in Miles. at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London. Picture: Colin J Smith

Miles. continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London until 7 March 2026.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The life of jazz legend Miles Davis is tailor made for a musical biography. Davis is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th Century and his landmark 1959 recording Kind of Blue is still hailed as one the greatest albums of all time, in any genre. But, like many other musical geniuses, Davis was a complex and flawed human being – an intimidatingly difficult, sometimes violent womaniser whose life was blighted by drug addiction until his death aged 65 in 1991.

This viscerally vivid production from :DELIRIUM: and Lauren Reed Productions – first seen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2025 – doesn’t shy away from showing the darker side of his personality, but concentrates more on demonstrating and celebrating Davis’ musical innovation and artistic legacy rather than dwelling on his demons.

Writer/director Oliver Kaderbhai’s production is suitably knotty and dense, made even more intense by its uninterrupted, interval-free 90-minute running time. It’s more like a play with music than a full-blown musical, with extracts from Davis’ pieces – some recorded, some played live – peppered throughout the production rather than played in full, which might frustrate some.

The story of Davis’ early life leading up to the creation of Kind of Blue is woven around a parallel narrative that sees a contemporary musician, played by Canadian trumpeter and DJ Jay Phelps, turning to the master tapes from the album, and a ghostly apparition of Davis himself (Benjamin Akintuyosi), to cure his own creative block.

Ultimately it tries to do too much, and, due to its dual narrative and skittishly non-chronological structure, tells an oddly incomplete story of Davis’ life.

But the music – or, at least what we hear of it – sounds fantastic. From the woozy, late-night swing of ‘So What’ to the dreamily freeform ‘Flamenco Sketches’, the story of how each of the iconic five tracks that make up Kind of Blue were created is absorbingly told through atmospheric vignettes, Colin J Smith’s video projections and Will Tonna’s immersive sound design. Jazz fans will revel in the meticulous details of production and notation but there is sometimes possibly too much detail for non-aficionados.

Highlights include the story behind the wistfully romantic ‘Blue in Green’, inspired by an intense love affair with French chanteuse Juliette Gréco in 1940s Paris, and interactions with key people in Davis’ life, like his inspirational high school music teacher in St Louis and mentors and collaborators such as Dizzy Gillespie, who are mostly played by Phelps.

We also learn of the wide-ranging musical influences, from gospel to Prokofiev, that led Davis from the syncopated bebop of his early playing days to the modal jazz sound he pioneered in Kind of Blue.

Davis’ drug addiction is arrestingly presented, most shockingly in scenes where he cooks up a fix of heroin while his infant child sleeps nearby, and then suffers agonising withdrawal as he goes cold turkey back at the Missouri farm he grew up on. These scenes occur on and around a rotating grand piano which is well-used at the centre of Ellie Wintour’s striking set. Davis is presented as a neglectful father and unfaithful husband, but the production stops short of portraying the physically abusive behaviour towards women that Davis later admitted to.

Phelps is as engaging presence but the production is powered by a terrific, star-making performance from Akintuyosi as Davis. Akintuyosi nails Davis’ nervy, hardwired intensity and, in his later years, distinctively raspy voice, but the live musical elements are handled by Phelps.

Surprisingly, the show’s climax ends up being more of a showcase for Phelps’ skills as a trumpeter and composer, as Davis fades from view and Phelps plays an original piece inspired by Davis’ Round About Midnight album. But the preceding 85 minutes contains bursts of exhilarating brilliance and the whole show does a good job of communicating just what a mercurial musical force of nature Davis was.

Chris Bartlett