The Three Robbers

Above all, it is an album for children, written and drawn by Tomi Ungerer in 1961.

And this story, it’s about three robbers who have very special weapons:
one has a blunderbuss
one has a bellows full of pepper : the famous pepper-blower
one has a big red axe.

The blunderbuss scares everyone.
Pepper disturbs and disorients horses.
The axe damages the carriage wheels

And all three of them are wearing very amazing hats – which makes it possible to identify them as thieves, but not to know what their faces are.

As they are real brigands, they attack stagecoaches.
And since they are heroes, they have accumulated an immense treasure – well hidden in their mountain hut.

( Do you remember the tales surrounding “the old man of the mountain”? )

And then, one day, of course… they will cross Tiffany’s road.
Will their ugly bandit hearts be touched by the little girl, sent to a horrible old aunt’s house? hum. No

The little trickster starts of course by making them believe that she is not just any little girl, and makes them dream of her father, a rich maharaja, and this is how the story’s gonna play out.

It is, I believe, a rather famous story among our English-speaking comrades. There have been several adaptations: in cartoons, movies, stage direction.

In France, it’s not very well known.
But, uh..:
it hasn’t prevented artists from working on a stage adaptation, too.

Why has this happened? Because the story is very, very simple and even bad guys can become good guys.
Because there’s the “salt” of the “villain” heroes at the beginning, and my goodness, when you’re little, being the villain in your imagination is very pleasant.
Especially since these Villains have a kind heart.

And especially because the visuals are very scenic: the three props – the hat – the mountain – it allows you to create extremely aesthetic scenes from the start.

I wanted to show you the French adaptation made by the company Les Muettes Bavardes. They used almost all scenic means: puppets, shadow theatre, light plays, object theatre, etc.

And as a result, it freed the imagination on this story: here are some visuals from the adaptation made by the company Succursale 101: frankly, don’t these images make you want to go see these 3 Robbers?