The Little Prince is heading to London in March – and I was one of the first to witness a special preview performance of the show.
The book has sold more than 200million copies in 250 languages – and it comes second only to the Bible for the title of Most Translated Book. After hugely successful sell-out shows everywhere from Sydney, New York and Paris to Dubai, and even Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, it’s finally getting its London debut – and here’s why you should get in on the action.
State of the art video projections will invite audiences to immerse themselves in the world of The Little Prince – a boy with his own planet who falls in love with a rose – as originally told by author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. At one point, the book was banned completely in France, after the author was exiled for his views on the revolution – but now it’s celebrating the 80th anniversary of its French language edition.
Unlike its once banned status might suggest, the nearly two-hour long show is pure innocent escapism, something which star of the show Dylan Barone is tasked with portraying purely through dance moves. He’ll be seen performing acrobatics while suspended eight metres in the air and making complex trapeze manoeuvres look effortless.
He’d never attempted aerial dance before the tour, but tells us he trained up to seven hours a day for several months, enduring agonising muscular pains, to perfect his art – and felt no fear. Anne Tournié and Chris Mouron direct the show, while the latter narrates too, bringing verbal meaning to the scenes that unfold.
Some are heavily influenced by the author’s adventurous life as a military aviator; his plane once crashed in the Sahara Desert, leaving him without food or water for days – and subsequently his feverish imagination dreamt up the Little Prince.
The dark days in the desert are relived with the aviator himself as a co-star – he and the Prince are near death from dehydration, before a miracle happens and their thirsts are quenched by bouts of pouring rain, giving them the strength to dance.
Is it a wishful hallucination caused by delirium from lack of water, or has the rain really begun – and does the Little Prince die in the end, after the aviator is forced to leave him behind?
With the author long since dead and the book’s ending ambiguous, these are questions that only the audience members themselves can answer through their own interpretation.
Meanwhile, the book might be almost a century old, but it’s packed with thought-provoking life lessons that are still applicable in the present day.
For example, a lamp-lighter living on a planet where every day is just a minute long can be seen racing up and down lighting the lamp every night and then darkening it again seconds later to mark dawn.
Constantly following repetitive and robotic orders, he’s a parody of those who are so caught up in the rat race that they’ve forgotten to slow down, take a breath and feel for the little pleasures in life.
Mobile phones have been worked into the choreography too, with dancers preening in the mirror and taking endless selfies, while video projections portray stock market rates, financial calculations and people feverishly counting their money.
The cautionary tale warns against getting swept up in consumer culture and obsessing over wealth, status and vanity at the expense of what is truly important – the language of the heart.
With the Prince valuing personal fulfilment over professional success and imagination over materialism, we are convincingly drawn into the mindset of the awakened child.
The author’s great nephew, Olivier d’Agay, has already seen the show and speaks highly of its “homage to the wonder of childhood”.
He explains: “The Little Prince on stage stands as a tribute to the eternal child within, inviting us to rediscover dreams long forgotten and gaze at the stars with renewed wonder.”
The show invites viewers into the compelling world of The Little Prince to relearn what they left behind in childhood – and it’d be impossible to emerge unaffected.
The Little Prince comes to the London Coliseum between March 12 and March 16 – find out more at https://www.thelittleprincetour.com/