There is a reason Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s classic fairy tale is one of the best-selling works in all of literature – despite its short length, it works as a beautiful and textured treatise on friendship, love, loneliness, and loss. It’s not an easy text to adapt to drama, let alone a one-person show, but Toby Thompson’s show The Little Prince manages to capture the whimsical yet somber tone of the story.
Many will already be familiar with the story – an aviator crashes into the Sahara Desert and needs to fix his plane before he runs out of water. Here he meets a mysterious young boy wearing a green scarf who calls himself ‘the little prince’. The little prince tells the aviator about his life, the planets he’s visited, the rose he loves back home, and an important secret he has learnt about love and life.
Toby Thompson brings the characters to life with subtle costume changes – the scarf represents the little prince, a paper crown represents a king he meets on one of the planets – instead relying on his physicality and dynamism to embody the different voices. The set of The Little Prince is also very minimalist, with just a desk, a few paint pots (which he stands on when being a ‘grown-up’), some background projection, and a giant orrery with glowing planets to represent which planet we are currently viewing the action on. Some sand represents the Sahara Desert, and in a beautiful scene that reflects on the vast number of stars in the sky and grains of sand in the desert, Thompson pours sand onto the floor for a long time, beautifully backlit by the fluorescent lighting. It’s a simple, childlike action but effective and full of depth, much like the source material itself.
Some changes have been made, of course; some of the planets are cut out or truncated, but never in a way that betrays the spirit of the piece – except perhaps the planet of the Conceited Man, who is reimagined as a selfie-obsessed social media influencer. This is a little heavy-handed and doesn’t feel as timeless as the rest of the story. Nevertheless, The Little Prince is a moving and creative piece of theatre that does the book more than justice.
