Oliver Lansley: Les Enfants Terribles; Collected Plays

Oliver Lansley

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849437257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Includes the plays Ernest and the Pale Moon, The Terrible Infants and The Vaudevillains Les Enfants Terribles: Collected Plays presents a thematic trilogy of plays from one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies. As a document of the company's progress over its ten-year history, the collection also features production photos, design sketches and introductions to each play. The Terrible Infants (2007) blends puppetry, live music, performance and storytelling to present a series of twisted tales for children and adults. Inspired by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. Ernest and the Pale Moon (2009) is a noir horror based upon a tale of murderous envy. The Vaudevillains (2010) is a dark miniature musical whodunnit…when the owner of The Empire music hall is murdered, everyone's a suspect…

Pig design sketch, ‘Golden Cleaver’ – Sam Wyer

Foreword

Long-time Les Enfants Terribles collaborator and composer Tomas Gisby and I had been toying with the idea of writing a musical for a while. Through The Terrible Infants and increasingly in Ernest and the Pale Moon, our passion for live music in our work was growing and the scores were becoming more and more prominent.

Music can create a mood or a place so quickly, often more quickly than you can with words, which allows you to jump between locations and moods at speed. It can be, in effect, a guide which whisks your audience up and takes them along on their journey, telling them the moments they need to feel tense, happy or sad. This can be very appealing to a writer as it does half your job for you! In The Vaudevillains it allowed us the freedom to pack in quite a large number of different worlds and stories to its relatively brief running time.

Tom and I were immediately very attracted by the cabaret/music hall conceit that forms the backbone of The Vaudevillains. We were keen to embrace this world but at the same time shoot it through with a strong narrative; therefore we needed a story which tied all our disparate acts together and so the murder-mystery seemed perfect: a framing device which allowed us to explore all the different backstories of the weird and wonderful acts at The Empire whilst still remaining pertinent to the central narrative. Creating these characters and working in this world was a real joy and did in many ways feel like the culmination of our work on previous productions. We viewed each song as a story. The thing that immediately struck me with putting words to music is that it allowed me to be a lot more direct, to cut straight to the meat as it were, which has quite a distilling effect in terms of the way you compose a story. Also, as someone fascinated by language, I enjoyed the exploration of how words behave differently when sung than when spoken – often landing our cast with near-impossible vocal tongue twisters to force their classically trained teeth around.

Published here is the libretto without the score, which is a bit like looking at a rainbow in black and white! However I do hope you can still get a sense of the anarchic fun of the piece and enjoy the stories within. I also hope that one day you will get to listen to Tomas’s wonderful music too.

Oliver Lansley

Composer’s Note

When Oliver and I created The Vaudevillains we wanted the subjects and themes to reach beyond its fictional home of The Empire music hall. During the show the setting quickly changes between the stage of The Empire and a variety of other intriguing locations, as the Acts’ colourful backstories unfold.

Likewise, I wanted the music to have influences spanning further than the walls of Charlie’s Club. Similar to the music that Neil Townsend and I composed for The Terrible Infants, the score draws on various genres, from jazz to classical, swapping styles to suit each of the tales of the Acts. Most importantly, I wanted to create some catchy melodies that an audience would find themselves humming as they left the theatre.

I hope you enjoy reading the libretto for The Vaudevillains, and I hope that one day you get to hear it sung too!

Tom Gisby

Co-Director’s Note

It is very apt that these three shows have been published together in one volume. At first glance a Roald Dahl-esque family show, a Gothic noir ghost story and a Vaudeville musical might not seem that similar but these shows represented a time for the company where we were keen to explore a very wide variety of techniques; puppets, instruments, moving sets, live bands etc. The stories themselves play with structural narrative and as producers and creatives we wanted that to be reflected in how we brought them to life. As Co-director of The Vaudevillains and one of the key creatives of The Terrible Infants, I was always keen to try and tell the story in a simple but creative way – using puppets, bits of junk or whatever else was to hand. For The Vaudevillains, which was the company’s first musical, I never saw it as a piece of musical theatre and was very keen to create a world that would work equally as well without song. It seemed a natural progression for the company to tackle a musical but the focus, as always, was the script and the story. For better or for worse, I had no preconceived ideas of how a musical should be presented; Oli’s writing is pretty descri...