ELEPHANT

Menier Chocolate Factory

★★★★

“We are fascinated by what Lucas has to say, but it’s the music that truly speaks for itself”

As we sit round an upright piano, we are given an in-depth analysis of the aftereffects of striking a piano key. How the slim slab of ivory trips a lever which brings a soft felt-lined hammer onto a metal string, which, in turn, causes the air to vibrate eventually spreading across the room and filling each of us with the same vibration that we call music. We are inextricably linked and reeled in by the unifying hook that transfixes us. Anoushka Lucas is the one telling us all this, although she doesn’t need this allegory to catch, and to hold, our attention. She is a natural-born raconteur, with a charismatic flair to match.

“Elephant” is written, composed and performed by Lucas. We suspect that there are veiled, autobiographical elements hidden within her monologue, but she is telling us Lylah’s story who, at the age of seven, watched a group of workmen rip out the windows of her family’s council flat to lower a piano into their living room. From then on it dominated her small living space, her life and her love affair with music began. This love of music drives the narrative, but it is fuelled by various pivotal moments in Lylah’s life that shape her identity as a mixed-race, working-class girl who dares to be different. Who dares to cross the class divide. Who dares to defy the white, misogynistic expectations that music executives have for her career. Who dares to challenge the innate and unearned privilege of colonialist descendants.

Lylah is continually drawn back to the piano. Sitting centre stage, slowly revolving as Lucas plays and sings. Entirely acoustic and without the aid of technological trickery her singing is intimate, rich and mellow. The piano is an extension of Lylah but when a song ends, we are back in the narrative and the piano becomes the elephant in the room. Lylah’s piano has ivory keys, and she has a hard time reconciling the beauty of her instrument with the cruelty that went into its construction. The brutal tearing out of the tusks from the elephant’s face, the use of enslaved people to transport the tusk. Lucas is able to revisit this theme with ease without hammering the point. Jess Edwards’ supple direction is sensitive to the crescendos and diminuendos of Lylah’s story; each element played as part of a rhapsody. A sharp piano note heralds a twist in the tale while Laura Howards lighting shifts through shades to illuminate the various phases of her life. We learn a lot about Lylah’s childhood – Lucas is expert at seeing the world through a child’s eyes, and then retaining that unfiltered honesty, bringing it with her into adulthood. Love comes in the form of Leo, a session drummer, who invites her to his family cottage. The ’cottage’ is, in fact, a nine-bedroom country manor, furnished with the trappings of the Empire. Including a mahogany grand piano. Lylah cannot prevent herself addressing the ‘elephant in the room’ – literal and symbolic – and the anger that pours out is heartfelt and human without being sanctimonious or political.

We then return to the music. Then back to another episode of life. But always back to the music. Sometimes the musical interludes are brief, and the show could perhaps do with more performance and less talk. The show is bookended by the observation that the black and the white keys on a piano are disproportionately balanced. It is an interesting analogy at the beginning, but we don’t need it repeated. Lucas has shown us that music is blind to this distinction. We are fascinated by what Lucas has to say, but it’s the music that truly speaks for itself.

ELEPHANT

Menier Chocolate Factory

Reviewed on 30th May 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Manuel Harlan

Previously reviewed at this venue:

DRACULA, A COMEDY OF TERRORS | ★★★★ | March 2025

THE PRODUCERS | ★★★★★ | December 2024

THE CABINET MINISTER | ★★★★ | September 2024

CLOSE UP – THE TWIGGY MUSICAL | ★★★ | September 2023

THE THIRD MAN | ★★★ | June 2023

THE SEX PARTY | ★★★★ | November 2022

LEGACY | ★★★★★ | March 2022

HABEAS CORPUS | ★★★ | December 2021

BRIAN AND ROGER | ★★★★★ | November 2021

ELEPHANT

RHINOCEROS

Almeida Theatre

★★★★

“an appeal to the senses, an experience as peculiar and nonsensical as a fit of the giggles”

Director Omar Elerian’s electrifying interpretation of the absurdist classic Rhinoceros is as much about theatre as it is about marauding pachyderms.

In his vision of French Romanian writer Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 fable, Elerian meticulously parodies the conventions of theatre and presents them back to the audience with a knowing wink.

In this case, theatre becomes a series of artificial and disconnected moments that meld alchemically into a kaleidoscopic whole.

People don’t so much talk to each other as engage in the mechanics of dialogue, delivering nonsensical retorts and ever spiralling repetitions. No-one listens. Communication is impossible. Extended riffs on, say, the number of horns on the eponymous rhinoceros rise into a dizzying tumult of words, sometimes pin sharp, then losing focus, only to return to a semblance of meaning measured by weight alone.

The audience is puzzled, bored, irritated, mesmerised, intrigued, amused – often within the same minute.

In an overlong and sometimes grating production, the story features a provincial French village – perhaps something out of a Wes Anderson movie – with a cast of deadpan pedants and eccentrics. A rhinoceros charges through the village square causing chaos. Then another, which tramples a cat. Soon it emerges that the villagers themselves are becoming the beasts.

Political writer Ionescu was, perhaps, thinking of the spread of fascism in pre-war France, making points about conformity and appeasement to the monstrous.

Elerian, wisely, veers away from heavy-handed politics and leans into the comedy. In his own translation, he updates the gags to include references to Covid, Wallace and Gromit and Severance. He gathers about him a troupe of actors superbly adept at the challenge of farce.

John Biddle, Hayley Carmichael, Paul Hunter, Joshua McGuire, Anoushka Lucas, Sophie Steer, and Alan Williams – in suitable white coats against a box-of-tricks white stage – are put through their paces in a series of scenarios, like an improv troupe picking suggestions out of a top hat.

Elerian creates a grandiose, meta-flecked circus – complete with clowns, kazoos and funny wigs. His message appears to be that laughter creates community when meaning fails.

In the most effective sequence McGuire, as Jean, battles with the agonies of transformation, a rousing set piece that exemplifies the thrilling choreography that is a highlight of the production.

Like Jean, the villagers succumb one by one to the plague until the hero of the piece, flustered slob and everyman Berenger (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), is left on his own, making a stand against the onslaught.

At this point, anti-theatre becomes theatre again. Rhinoceros finally relies on the tropes of storytelling to make a connection – but too late. Without the groundwork, this burst of coherent humanity feels unearned.

Never mind. Rhinoceros is an appeal to the senses, an experience as peculiar and nonsensical as a fit of the giggles.

Tag Archives: Anoushka Lucas

ELEPHANT

★★★★

Menier Chocolate Factory

ELEPHANT

Menier Chocolate Factory

★★★★

“We are fascinated by what Lucas has to say, but it’s the music that truly speaks for itself”