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The Lamps of Night and Day There is night With the evening sun disappearing There’s an army of people appearing Bringing light to streets of the city One by one ...every lamp makes a path in the darkness Oh no … don’t you let, let them fade away There is light You got love … as you walk through the streets of the city Oh no …you can’t make … make the sun go down (Words and Music © Peter Dulborough - Sung by Peter Dulborough)  ‘The lamps of Night and Day’ is a song taken from an original musical ‘The Prince and the Rose’. It is freely adapted from the book ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint –Exupéry. I wrote the songs and music for this project in which I collaborated with scriptwriter and artistic Director Ann Davies. This is one of my favourite songs from the musical and was used for ‘The dance of the lamplighters’ in the production. It relates to the moment the Prince decides to visit the largest and most varied of all the planets on his travels – planet Earth. The Geographer tries to portray the sheer vastness of the Earth and uses a wonderfully poetic image. He recounts how in days gone by the street lamps were all lit by hand by lamplighters. To convey the idea of this incredible task over such a vast territory, he asks the Prince to imagine looking at the scene of the lamplighters at work from far away. He conjures up a wonderful picture as he relates the number of lamplighters needed to light the street lamps over the whole six continents of the world. Seen from a great distance, all the lamplighters of the world working over the various parts of the globe would make a splendid spectacle. As night and day fall at different times on the earth, at any one time there would always be some place on the globe falling into the shadows of dusk and being illuminated by a small army of lamplighters. As seen from afar, the process of lighting the street lamps over the world would seem a regulated movement like that of a ballet in the opera. Such movement of light would have been a magnificent sight to observe. A gradual and constant play of moving light travelling across the face of the globe in search of fading twilight. A fluid dance of travelling light and patches of dusk as fading daylight was lit up by pools of a warm, sulphurous amber glow. Behind the ‘The Prince and the Rose’ The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is one of the most best loved books published in the last 50 years. However, it is not so much a story for children as a wonderfully subtle, wry and also profound account of the complexities of human relationships and emotions. It touches such universal themes as loneliness and alienation, as well as the nature of friendship and love. The bizarre and bewildering encounters of the Prince with a power obsessed King, an unhappy drunk, a self centred conceited man and pompous Geographer not to mention a contorted thinking Businessman, are all meetings that portray characters who are familiar to our contemporary world. They seem fictional characters but are not really far removed from our own society. They are parodies of certain human traits and of the strangeness of human behaviour as seen from a neutral observer Our musical was a freely adapted version and set in contemporary urban surroundings and focused on two parallel stories. The first was between the relationship between the naïve, inexperienced and rather confused Prince and his touchy, demanding and sensitive Rose. The second was the story of the Narrator and the theme of the ‘child inside the man’. This was drawn out through the relationship between the busy adult ‘office dwelling Narrator’ (a pilot in the book) and the inquisitive and spontaneous boy he meets on a London park bench who recounts his strange story of a life on another planet and his decision to leave it in search of other life and worlds. The central theme of friendship and need for gradual ‘taming’ and growth in intimacy though lies at the heart of this story and our production. The belief in the gradual trust that develops between two people and the growth of a unique and special bond and relationship with someone we have ‘tamed’. We then become ‘responsible’ for this person forever. This theme is portrayed through the encounter between the Fox and the Prince. ‘We are responsible for those we love’ is the message of these key passages and also the truth that ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye’. |
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