We sat down for a quick chat with Oliver Kaderbhai about his latest project. MILES is a bold theatrical work inspired by the life and legacy of Miles Davis and his musical influences with a live Jazz underscore. Offering an imagined portrait, the play explores the inner world of an artist driven by innovation, ambition, and contradiction. Running at Southwark Playhouse Borough 4 Feb – 7 Mar 2026, tickets here: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/miles/
MILES. moves fluidly through time, memory, and music — what drew you to a non-linear, jazz-like structure as the best way to tell Miles Davis’s story?
The question in the show is ‘how did Miles arrive at a place in his life where he was able to create the album Kind of Blue by the age of 32?’. So I focused on his influences, including people, places and events from the first half of his life, and of course on the music itself. ‘Time’ has a different meaning when used in the context of music, and I grew up playing jazz in bands, so I essentially turned the play into a ‘head arrangement’ where the ‘head’ is any time we return to the conversation between Jay and Miles and the ‘solos’ are when Miles speaks directly to the audience or takes us into a scene from his life.
Kind of Blue is often mythologised as effortless genius — what did you want to reveal about the pressure, conflict, and chaos behind its creation?
It’s always been interesting to me to pull back the curtain on the creation of something. It’s important that we’re still able to surprise our audiences so there’s a balance to find in not being too revealing, but ultimately most art is created by groups of people as a result of their combined experiences. It’s the culmination of lifetimes of lessons and mistakes, so inherently effortful. Of course, I have imagined the conversations that might have happened between Miles and others, and I have inferred the impact of events from his life through what I discovered in his autobiography and interviews, but it has been important to me that the portrayal is authentic and the story as honest as possible with the information I’ve had access to.
How did working so closely with a live musician shape your approach to direction, and where did you allow the music to lead the storytelling rather than the script?
Jay’s decades of experience as a musician have been invaluable. He has deep knowledge of music and specifically jazz and the people who created it. He even gave Benji (playing Miles) a few trumpet lessons. He has also been hugely gracious by letting me embellish and invent aspects of his life to create his character, which is an imagined version of him. The music led the storytelling, including the creation of the script. I wanted to feature every track from Kind of Blue in the show, so I had to figure out how, when and why to do so. And it’s such a treat to hear Jay play the music live in such an intimate setting, so it quickly became clear when the music needed to (metaphorically) take centre stage.
Miles Davis was both revolutionary and deeply flawed — how did you navigate portraying his brilliance without softening the darker costs of his genius?
I knew it would be an almost impossible task to get the balance ‘right’ between these aspects of Miles’ personality, so it then became a case of trying to tell the story in a way which focuses on the art and the music whilst not shying away from the darker parts of his life. In his autobiography he speaks openly about racism, drug use, and his treatment of women which are some of the more difficult parts of his story. As such, it became a little more straightforward to include those things. For me, the aim was to understand the man and celebrate the music. I don’t expect the audience to always agree with him.
The production sits between concert, theatre, and biography — what excites you about blurring those boundaries for a contemporary audience?
It’s a combination of the things I most enjoy so it’s been a lot of fun to build a show which is so reliant on both music and theatre. It has been a challenge to get inside the mind of a man as complex as Miles. For weeks I had his music on repeat and books about his life with me wherever I went. My work as a director has always had a strong relationship with music, so to include a live musical element has been a thrill because it creates an electricity in the room which is unique. The fact its jazz means we are able to build in improvised elements every night, so we have leant into that facility and no two shows will be the same.
Bringing the show to Southwark Playhouse during the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth, what do you hope today’s audiences take from his legacy now, rather than as history?
I love watching audiences nodding along or tapping their feet with the music whilst learning about the people behind it, because they were pioneers who literally put their lives on the line to create music which transcends the impossible societal tightrope they were expected to walk at the time. The themes in the play are unfortunately cyclical: divided societies, unfair pay, the rise of technology etc. It’s important to me that we keep these stories alive and it’s something touched upon within the play. The legacy of this music isn’t co-incidence. It lives on because of the effort of the people behind it. If we can have a hand in encouraging our audiences to give it another listen, then our job is done.