Lilliput & Blefuscu

Programming / to stage.

After Ravouka, how not to think of Gulliver and his great journey to Lilliput?
Then his even greater journey to Brobdingnag?

and… if you don’t see Gulliver on the picture, it’s normal : he is a little bit too big.

Once a hundred thousand times too big, after once a hundred thousand times too small, Gulliver will not be the right size to go unnoticed.

All right, I know, there is a very adult and satirical dimension in Gulliver’s Travels and even in France one quickly understands that an Irishman had a small grudge against the English – and that the key to understanding between Liiliput and Blefuscu is quite clear – for an adult.

Yes – okay – from a historical point of view it is quite fascinating.
But : have you read Gulliver’s Travels with an English history textbook?

Well, aren’t we, almost all, generations: texts arranged for children ?- and here are all the great literary works reworked in pure adventure version. I’m not even talking about the cartoon versions.

So I feel quite free with regard to Mr. Jonathan Swift to continue in the vein: great adventure, forgetting all about the side: satire of the English manners and customs of the 17th century.

Can you imagine that moment of pure joy when we make the children live Gulliver in virtual?
Their enchanted cries when they don’t have to step on people so small, we don’t see them, they are not bigger than ants !!! The cry of delighted terror – but while giving the hand to someone – when by raising the eyes, they will see that the wall, it is the foot of a giant!
We have all the technology we need to experience this.
We have the text to stage it.
So what do we do?

Gulliver tied up, hair by hair, all caught up in thousands and thousands of little threads and getting up, just physically annoyed?
Gulliver who enters the city, with feet far too big for this city
Gulliver in his boat, which makes 10 TItanics at least for the Lilliputians
Gulliver who tries to understand the dark – and terrible – story of the boiled eggs that agitates the kingdom: by which end do you break your egg? The big end or the little end?
Don’t think it doesn’t matter.
It’s terribly important.
How are you going to get your buttered bread in if you don’t open your egg properly?
Do you want to ruin the chickens? Kill the maids at the house? Do the beautiful spirit?
And what else?
This egg thing has led the country to civil war – not only can’t you get along with these people, but they are terribly dangerous.

As the giant Gulliver, under the totally futile pretext that he is bigger than the others, will finally refuse to crush, literally, the defeated, he will be, as a rule, condemned to death.
The emperor will be good prince: he is a foreigner, he does not understand anything. And he helped them anyway
So he will only have his eyes torn out
And only time to flee as quickly as possible – which he did promptly.

Do you realize that right now, Gulliver has found himself in the game-phenomenon (which is completely beyond me, but never mind) Animal Crossing? Okay, he became a seagull – which is even more beyond me. I don’t understand what this has to do with anything – it doesn’t matter.
What I do know is that every kid knows Gulliver’s name.
So it would be a shame to deprive ourselves of this happy coincidence.

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Featured Image : movie Les Voyages de Gulliver, by Georges Méliès, 1902.