The Elephant Man

Published Wednesday 27 February 2008 at 16:00 by John Highfield

More than 30 years down the line, it has to be said that Bernard Pomerance’s stage study of the life of the unfortunate John Merrick isn’t one of the late 20th century’s greatest pieces of theatre.

It is a slender story that rather too heavy-handedly addresses the enduring question of how we perceive the disabled.

Nevertheless, director Ellie Jones takes this talky material and fashions it into an engaging and handsome evening’s drama, helped enormously by Ellen Cairns’ simple but effective design and a hard-working ensemble.

Stripped of the prosthetics of David Lynch’s movie - not based on the Pomerance play - Joe Duttine has to rely simply on his own acting skills and rises quite wonderfully to the enormous challenge, using voice and body to suggest a man who knows nothing but hideous disfigurement.

Behind that exterior, however, there is a gentle, witty, perceptive man who seems better than the educated people who adopt his cause to understand the hypocrisies of the age, all of which Duttine captures perfectly.

Despite the title, the more central character is actually Frederick Treves, the esteemed doctor who rescues Merrick from one sideshow only to put him into another more comfortable one.

It’s a strong performance from Antony Byrne, suggesting the unease and even the torment of a man restricted by the 19th century’s blinkered morality.

Good work too from Catherine Kanter as Victorian stage star Madge Kendall, perhaps the one person who attempts to see beyond what Merrick represents and get to understand the man beneath, and Paul Moriarty as hospital chief and pompous pillar of society Carr Gom, who takes so little interest in the reality of his unlikely guest’s life that he can’t even bother to remember his name.

As a play, too much time is spent in the room at the London Hospital where Merrick spends his final days being visited by the rich, where once he had been gawped at by the poor.

A little more of that impoverished, unhappy background - which is dismissed in just a couple of early scenes - might have helped create the tragedy that somehow never really happens.