Elephant man with Bradley Cooper and Patricia Clarkson is a beautiful, powerful, poignant production, utilising the art of less, to accentuate depths of feeling and opening up the audiences connection. No makeup deformity, no reliance on shadows or hiding, but a confidence in the ability of the audience to see, feel and connect through portrayal of essential character without additives. No big broadway mechanical sets here: Just curtains manually pulled across the stage to close and create scene changes. Cooper uses a gaping mouth movement and the folding of his fingers on the right hand together with a circular hip based gait as the only outward shows of deformity. This profound simplicity and absence of complex outward deformity in Cooper is compensated by the use of actual photographs of John Merrick. It perfectly serves the directors intent - shying away from the more vulgar representation of deformity and difference, coaxing the audience to examine its way of seeing and habits of ignoring from the earliest stages. The particular plight of elephant man is inflicted by a specific appetite of a society and made horrific by the inability to see the human being and the habit of recoiling at deformity. True his story of notoriety commences during a time when travelling shows profited from the publics lust to ogre difference and deformity, but it is just as recognisable today notwithstanding its absence from current entertainment. It is this phenomena which the director has utilised to gently and carefully force wide open the portal of empathy for the person beneath the deformity and difference, through recognition and consequential connection with the elephant man, aided by brilliant acting and writing. The squalor of Johns initial predicament is juxtaposed beautifully in the writing with his circumstances later where he is cared for and nurtured in comparatively privileged quarters, courted by royalty and the powerful, and yet remaining isolated and separate. It is a natural enough reaction, but superficial and the play gently reveals the human potential to have a deeper experience of ourselves through recognising our habit of isolating those who are apparently less attractive or merely different. A great piece of theatre.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 04:34:39 +0000
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