Les Enfants Terribles
This article titled “Les Enfants Terribles” was written by Andrew Clements, for The Guardian on Tuesday 24th August 2010 21.00 UTC
In the 1990s, Philip Glass composed a trilogy of music-theatre pieces based on films by Jean Cocteau. His remarkable reworking of La Belle et la Bête was brought to London by the composer’s own ensemble soon after the premiere, while the first and most conventional of the three, Orphée, was seen at the Linbury theatre five years ago. But Les Enfants Terribles, completed in 1996, has had to wait for its British premiere, impressively staged by the Volta theatre company as the last event in this year’s Grimeborn season, east London’s alternative summer opera festival.
Glass reworks Cocteau’s 1950 screenplay as a “dance opera”, with a quartet of singers, a dance troupe (of four in this staging) and three pianos. Sung in the original French, the vocal writing is economical, leaving the dance to carry much of the narrative thread, and the spoken narration to fill in the crucial gaps. It works well in its alienated way, with the insistent keyboard writing providing the energy to propel the dance, and the unfussy yet effective production by Andrea Ferran, Rob McNeill’s inventive choreography and really committed performances catching that dream-like world exactly.
It was a mistake, though, to make Les Enfants Terribles the second half of an overlong double bill that began with Ed Hughes’s interminable Cocteau in the Underworld, a half-baked exploration of the author’s creativity to a text by Roger Morris. With Andrew McIntosh as Cocteau and Lucy Williams as the Princess, this “workshop performance” was far better than the material deserved. Already extensively workshopped as part of Covent Garden’s Opera Genesis project, the piece is still dramatically unfocused and musically inert; surely somebody could have put it out of its misery before it reached a paying audience?
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