The Elephant Man

Published Tuesday 10 April 2007 at 15:30 by Mark Shenton

In the midst of the clinical drugs trial that went so terrifyingly wrong at Northwick Park Hospital last year, the girlfriend of one of the volunteers afflicted said he resembled the Elephant Man after his head and neck blew up to three times their natural size, just as in the true 19th-century story of Joseph Merrick.

Now the play of that name, originally premiered on the London fringe in 1977 and subsequently becoming a Broadway and National Theatre hit, is back. It still packs a powerful punch, even without - or maybe because of - the lack of prosthetics that John Hurt used in his Oscar-nominated 1980 film performance to convey the affliction.

Instead, the theatre requires the audience to make their own imaginative leap and believe they are seeing what is not actually in front of them. In the case of Marc Pickering’s performance as Merrick, however, our eyes are drawn to the real-life burn scars that he suffers from on his arms and shoulder as he climbs naked into a bath.

We have, hopefully, come on from the days when the likes of Merrick were paraded as fairground attractions, even if their stories continue to fascinate us as theatrical ones. Pickering’s bold, brave revelation of his own scars and the fact that we inevitably register them, is a pertinent reminder of the lines that we cross as note a physical affliction. The selflessness and dignity of the performance is also revealed in other, less obvious ways.

Unlike his My Fair Lady namesake, Pickering is not just a bystander here but he provides a powerful anchor to a play that is, in fact, part My Fair Lady - as a kindly doctor Treves (Ayden Callaghan) takes him into his own home and tutors him to be able to be introduced into polite society that does not always show its politeness - and part Phantom of the Opera, as he discovers and expresses his sexuality with Jennifer Taylor’s Mrs Kendal.