Seat selection on map [Lille Opera | 20.03.2026 - 20:00 | Les Enfants terribles] - Opéra de Lille

They stop going to school, follow their own rules, and couldn’t care less about ‘finding their place in the world’. They think they’ve found it: their room. Jean Cocteau’s ‘enfants terribles’ – Paul and Élisabeth – are orphaned teenage siblings. In the short novel published in 1929, the author highlights the fragile nature of adolescence.
American composer Philip Glass is the most-performed living opera composer in the world. With his minimalist musical language, he renders the impasse of this story in nearly mechanical fashion. Three pianos play hypnotic loops while repeated themes create a magnetic pull suggestive of the protagonists’ psychological imprisonment and their inability to stop the destructive process. True to Cocteau’s belief in the extraordinary power of the imagination and creativity, young German theatre director Matthias Piro leads the problematic couple through a labyrinth of fantasies, waking dreams and parallel worlds, where they are irremediably lost – until death crystallizes their love and youth for all eternity.

Virginie Déjos musical director 
Matthias Piro staging 

approx. 1hr.40 min. (no interval)
Sung in French with French and English surtitles