Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles is the story of a brother and sister so caught up in the world of their own perverse imaginations that they can no longer function outside it. Deeply claustrophobic, the work warns of the dangers of choosing to live inside a confected reality.
Between 1991 and 1996 the American composer Philip Glass created a trilogy of operatic works based on Cocteau’s writings. Les Enfants Terribles, for three pianos and a cast of singers and dancers, is the third. A new version of this work at the Barbican, directed and choreographed by Javier de Frutos, unites dancers from the Royal Ballet, contemporary dancers and singers from the Royal Opera’s young artists programme. It’s a lavish production, which lays bare the piece’s inherent strengths and weaknesses. Musically, Glass’s layered, harmonic score is fascinating, and the story and its themes are intriguing. As theatre, however, Les Enfants is hard going.
When we discover Paul and Elisabeth (known as Lise), they are young children living with their bedridden mother. Unsupervised, they run wild. A prequel added by De Frutos suggests that their bath-times are as sexually charged as they are playful. That these sessions lead to an incestuous relationship is never made explicit, but is implicit in all that follows. Central to the pair’s symbiosis is “the game”, in which they subject each other to ritualised psychological torture. This usually takes the form of Lise taunting Paul with escalating viciousness, and Paul (who is confined to his bed for much of the production, having been struck on the head by a stone concealed in a snowball), attempting to remain impassive.
Glass’s original production assigned a singer and a dancer to each of the main characters. De Frutos goes much further, doubling up the supporting roles as before, but assigning Paul and Lise a singer and four dancers each. His intention is to show us the characters in all their multifaceted complexity, as both the observers and the observed, and there are sequences when this works marvellously. As soprano Jennifer Davis sings the role of Lise, her fantasies and frustrations are played out by Zenaida Yanowsky, Clemmie Sveaas, Gemma Nixon and Kristen McNally. As a choreographer, De Frutos specialises in the hectically perverse, and he delivers teasing erotic pursuits, night-time games of hide-and-seek, and all manner of sensuous writhings and swarmings besides. Designer Jean-Marc Puissant, meanwhile, gives us steel-framed beds and sternly angular architecture softened by drapes in shades of flesh, putty and cream.
As the male dancers (Edward Watson, Jonathan Goddard, Thomasin Gülgeç, Thomas Whitehead) pace, pounce and strike attitudes in their underwear – never quite dressed, never quite undressed – the women sashay from scene to scene in rumpled dressing gowns of peach and oyster silk.
All of this is enjoyable. De Frutos is the most literary of choreographers, as works inspired by Tennessee Williams and others attest, and he teases out every sly inflection and nuanced exchange in Cocteau’s text. There’s a brilliantly nightmarish sleepwalking scene which sees the men climbing the bedroom walls in the dark, and freezing like cockroaches when touched by the light.
But for all the pleasurability of the detail, the piece fails to cohere. Glass’s score, if attractive, is eddying and circumlocutory, the French text is unshapely, and there’s little dramatic tension or pace. It doesn’t help that if you crane your neck upwards to read the surtitles (high above the proscenium arch), you miss what’s happening on stage. The dancers are without exception excellent, but they’re sadly underemployed. Goddard, in particular, is barely there. Watson is a fine dance-actor, but his languid hyperextensions have begun to look generic. At two hours this feels like a long evening.
