The theatre company Les Enfants Terribles are dedicated to creating original, innovative and exciting theatre that challenges, inspires and entertains. The man who founded his creative team is the actor and playwright Oliver Lansley. Well known to television viewers as the man who took on the extraordinary task of portraying the iconic radio and television star Kenny Everett in the 2012 biopic The Best Possible Taste, there is so much more to this versatile actor than portraying in wonderful style a man wrecked by personal demons.
His company has continued to grow and receive consistent critical acclaim, been nominated for and won top industry awards, and established a large and loyal following for its original and unique work. The company has performed productions to thousands of people all over the world including theatres in Australia, Poland, Czech Republic, Dubai, Norway, Singapore and has toured extensively all over the U.K.
Les Enfants Terribles bring their latest play, The Trench, to the Unity Theatre in Liverpool during April and I was able to catch up with Oliver Lansley whilst the group were in rehearsals.
Your play, The Trench, has been playing all around the country before coming to the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, how do you think it has been received?
“So far it has been received brilliantly. We started the play in Edinburgh last year. The response has just been phenomenal! It has had something like 14 or 15 five star reviews and we have had fantastic audiences, we sold out for the whole run in the Edinburgh and we booked this 70 odd date tour off the back of it. The reaction so far has been really, really great which is fantastic when you put so much into a show and to get that kind of response is just brilliant.”
One reviewer in London compared it to Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, was it difficult putting your mind into writing about the First World War?
“The thing was as soon as you start looking into a subject such as the First World War and really start exploring it, you realise that the scale of it was unimaginable and for me the real challenge was to take it from being a piece of history that we all know was terrible but sometimes so far away and being given as a lesson that it stops you from having an emotional response to it and the challenge is to find a way of keeping it fresh for the audience so that they can get emotionally involved to the whole horror of that period. Originally I was planning to write a normal straight play and what it ended up being was this 15 page verse poem. Trying to write it as a normal play, it didn’t feel as though it had enough weight to it or to capture the scale of what happened so that led me towards the war poetry and writing in verse and almost like a Greek tragedy, the scale of it is very much like a Greek tragedy, stories like Orpheus and the Underworld. For me it was the only way to explore those themes was in a fantasy at some point. Really the reality that we put in front of people sometimes is no less than the reality what actually happened.”
You seem to capture the horror of the First World War in a very highly emotive way.
“Well I hope so. I think that is always the challenge to present these things in a way that you haven’t necessarily seen before and in a particularly visceral way so you connect on a more emotional level or on a more experiential level rather than just being told how these things came about and what happened.”
Did the use of puppetry in the play present any issues?
“Well with any of the other shows we have done we never particularly set out to say this is going to have puppetry in or this, that or the other in. What it comes down to is what it is the best way to tell the story and when we go more into this more surreal, more fantasy world if you like, it just felt like a natural way of exploring and going how do we take ourselves out of this world and how do we delve into this strange underworld. It seems like puppetry was the right way to go for the character as he needed to be other worldly and not human. We have got wonderful designers who have worked with us and we just started to investigate that and it felt like the sensible way to go.”
In the best possible way it seems a far cry from the other plays you have written for the stage.
“I think in some ways the seriousness of the subject matter is different but I think there is a similarity in terms of the aesthetic and story-telling, all of our shows share the D.N.A. of being at their heart the beauty of the story and different ways of telling it. Although the content is different, there is a similarity in that approach of telling stories from different angles, the motifs of the tale will be familiar to those that have seen us before and enjoyed it will recognise what we are doing.”
I know you yourself are not coming up to Liverpool, which is a huge shame as I think the audience at the Unity Theatre would get a big buzz from seeing you but the five performers by the sounds of it will go down a storm.
“Yes, the five characters, four actors and one musician, the chorus revolves around the main character and then the singer songwriter, Alexander Wolfe, who plays live on stage and performs these beautiful songs on stage which is intrinsically linked to the experience of the whole piece.
It’s great to have your work come to Liverpool but again it seems that you are able to branch out and diversify your acting and writing – essentially a more dramatic piece but nonetheless more interesting than what you have done before with the tremendous Kenny Everett biopic last year.
“Working on the Kenny Everett play was an incredible experience. I felt a real affinity with him in the way that he did all his work and the end product, which was different in many ways. There was a sort of similarity in the sense that we wanted to tell stories and explore different meanings. He was an incredible pioneer in what he did on radio and later in television. He was like a kid in a sweet shop playing and exploring with different methods and different ways of doing what he did. That’s a little bit like the way I work with the theatre companies – what would be the most interesting, the most different ways of exploring these stories. I definitely felt a real affinity with him when I played that part and it was great that people who liked that will get the chance to come and see some of the other stuff I do.”
The Trench is at The Unity Theatre on Wednesday 10th April.
Ian D. Hall