Magnetic North Blog

I first came across the story of Victor, the so-called Wolf Boy of Aveyron, when I saw Francois Truffaut's film L'enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) as a sixth former. The story stayed with me and a few years ago I came across a copy of Lucien Malson’s book Wolf Children in a bookshop, with a still from the film on the front. In the book, Malson documents the various cases of feral children that have been documented and discusses the Victor case in some detail. The second half of the book consists of translations of Jean Itard’s two reports on Victor. Itard was the doctor who took on the task of tying to “civilise” Victor, and the two reports follow his ultimately fruitless attempts to teach Victor to speak.

Reading the book, and in particular Itard’s reports, brought the story back to me and the idea formed to make a theatre piece based around the story. As usual with these ideas, it was necessary for me to find a team with whom to develop the idea. I had known and admired Pamela Carter’s work for some time and something made me approach her about the idea of working on the play – subconsciously, it was probably her two plays for Stewart Laing that gave me the idea: both had French sources (Slope was about the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine and An Argument about Sex was based on Marivaux’s La dispute). At the time we first spoke, An Argument… had yet to be produced, but I knew the original play and the strange connection between La Dispute and the case of Victor (La dispute imagines the results of the “forbidden experiment” long dreamed of by philosophers where a child is deprived of human contact).

It seemed natural to then ask Sans facon and Simon Wilkinson to work on the project – I had had a particularly happy experience working with Tristan and Charles (otherwise known as Sans facon) on Walden, and now doing a full-on theatre production seemed a logical extention of that relationship. I liked the work Simon had done on After Mary Rose and had just invited him to become as associate artist of the company and I felt he would work well with Tristan and Charles (who are also associate artists).

What will follow on from this posting is some of the correspondence that has flowed between us over the past few months as the project has developed.

Nicholas Bone