The key to Javier De Frutos’s production of Les Enfants Terribles lies in the new dance prologue which he’s inserted before its opening act. Philip Glass’s 1996 dance-opera is based on Jean Cocteau’s novel about a pair of adolescent siblings who inhabit a claustrophobic fantasy world of private ritual and magical thinking, and De Frutos’ way of introducing that world is to invent a scene in which brother and sister are sharing a bath.
Elizabeth (danced by Zenaida Yanowsky) sits in the tub, her face gleaming with malign mischief as she slowly undresses her doll and incites Paul (Jonathan Goddard) to follow suit. As Paul obeys, his first instinctive clench of shame yields helplessly to desire and when Elizabeth taunts him to the point of masturbation, she reacts to his submission with a cool flash of triumph. Incest is never specified by Cocteau, yet for De Frutos it’s the force that binds the siblings. And while he’s using the prologue to establish that fact, he’s also introducing the conceit with which he’s opted to stage the entire story.
There isn’t just one pair of siblings who play sexual games in the bathroom, but four – all of them entwined within the choreography. And throughout the rest of the opera De Frutos works with multiple combinations of Elizabeth and Paul, to evoke the damaged complexity of their inner lives.
When the eight dancers are joined by four singers on stage, there’s a potential for chaos: in addition to playing the two siblings the cast also take on the roles of their hapless friends Agathe and Gérard, plus three other minor characters. Yet not only does De Frutos keep control of his numbers with impressive deftness, but his own dance imagery weaves an intricate physical poetry around Cocteau’s sung and spoken text. When Paul is sleepwalking there’s a hallucinatory trio of Pauls, gliding through a nocturnal skyscape. When Gerard wants Elizabeth to let him into the bedroom she shares with her brother, there are four Elizabeths ranked up to mock and challenge him. At certain moments that room can like a dormitory full of feral children. And it’s the force of numbers too that gives the final denouement the explosive power of tragedy.
De Frutos’ production is stylishly contained within Jean-Marc Puissant’s designs and gains an extra surreal twist from Tal Rosner’s projected video art. The combined dance talent, which includes Edward Watson and Clemmie Sveaas, is phenomenal – even if there are moments when individuals feel underused. Also very fine are the singers, with Gyula Nagy outstanding as the emotionally arrested Paul. Yet despite the best efforts of De Frutos and his team, there are real problems with the opera itself. Its music, scored for thee pianos, drives a compelling emotional pulse, yet the vocal lines are often strangely inexpressive and the work’s dramatic pace veers oddly between abrupt crisis and longeur. De Frutos may tilt at Cocteau’s world with a bravura imaginative flourish but Glass imposes limits he can’t always overcome.
