Guest Blog: Les Enfants Terribles' Oliver Lansley On THE TRENCH

So last night was my first performance of The Trench since 2012. We are bringing the show back to the Southwark Playhouse to commemorate the centenary of the end of the First World War.

I played the part of Bert in the show's original Edinburgh production - since then, the show has returned to Edinburgh, toured three times and had a brief but delightful sojourn to Norway, all with a different cast, but now I'm back!

The first thing for me to get my head around was the lines, and whether or not they were still in there, hidden in some dark recess of my mind. The piece is an epic war poem, which is mostly narrated by myself, so the lines to learn on my part are plentiful.

People often say to me when I refer to learning lines for a Les Enfants show - "You wrote it!".

Can I now confirm for posterity that just because the words come out of your brain, it doesn't mean they are permanently etched there in some kind of cerebral filing cabinet. Would you be able to recall verbatim the essay you wrote on Great Expectations for your GSCE English exam?

However, I have performed this show, many times, which is slightly different, and they often do linger around - as any actor who has lurched into a compulsive recitation of some previously forgotten text, after a friend coincidentally utters a old cue line, can attest.

After some digging around, I managed to locate the bones and start piecing them back together.

It's an interesting and exciting experience returning to a previously played role as an actor. As, like it or not, your choices are informed by who you are. But over time, who we are can change. Who I am has certainly changed since the last time I donned Bert's Mining Helmet.

Aside from the obvious extra creaks in your bones, when revisiting a show six years on, your relationship with yourself - and thus the character - is different.

All your old choices are all still in there. Hard-wired from dramatic repetition. But there's also a bunch of new stuff.

It's like an old suit, that kind of still fits, but when you put it on, you realise that actually it's a bit tight in certain areas and you might want to let the cuffs out a little - or maybe re-tailor the whole thing altogether.

It's a process of remoulding, mixing the old with the new.

I would like to say the new is better. It feels better... now, but maybe that's just because it fits better. It doesn't necessarily mean it is, it's just... different.

The more I get to revisit my plays, either as an actor or director, or simply an observer of someone else picking it up and doing their thing with it, the more I'm reminded of what an extraordinary, amorphous beast theatre can be.

A play can metamorphosise, bending itself into almost unrecognisable but equally brilliant shapes based upon the vision of those at the reins. Look at Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet next to Baz Luhrmann's...

I remember seeing a production of my play The Infant in Italy, in Italian, staged completely differently to any of our productions of the text. Though I didn't speak the language I loved every moment. It seemed to make more sense to me than it ever did in English, and it probably remains my favourite production of it.

What other medium has that kind of flexibility and adaptability? What else could stand up to such a rigorous process of destruction and reconfiguration?

I guess that why we all love theatre. It's live, both literally and figuratively.

Oliver Lansley is the Artistic Director of Les Enfants Terribles

The Trench is at Southwark Playhouse 10 October-17 November

Photo credit: Rah Petherbridge Photography

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