REVIEW | The Elephant in the Room, Theatre at the Tabard
Written by Russell
Disclaimer: gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review
I was really looking forward to seeing this play, because I really like elephants, what with their trunks and their brilliant memories and fun personalities. But the elephant in this room turns out to be; why is the play two hours long? An eighty-minute first half, a fifteen-minute break and then another forty minutes seems incredibly excessive for what should have been an hour-long show maximum.
The main character, the nineteen-year-old Ashley Davenport (played by Fraser Anthony), is on tour in India where he is ‘visited’ by Yama, King of death and the underworld, it’s not really clear why or how this visitation occurred, but let’s run with it.
Ashley’s wealthy aunt has recently died and left him her fortunes, which include a very large country manor house and a handsome portfolio, which will bring him in around three hundred thousand a year. That should be enough for most nineteen-year-olds to go on a wild spending spree, you know, fast cars, expensive jewellery, drugs, alcohol, elephant tattoos, make bad decisions and learn about life. But Ashley makes the worst possible decision a nineteen-year-old could possibly ever make, supposedly because of the ‘awakening he had in India, bumping into Yama ’, he decides to go and live in an old people's home because he no longer wants to live a full life. That’s a weird decision by anyone's standards. And possibly the main reason why the whole piece doesn’t work for me. I’m all for a bit of surreal comedy or unusual ideas, but it feels like a clumsy way to try and introduce this as a generation gap comedy.
But Ok there’s some potential for comedy there, I can see that. So let's have a look at the options.
The old people's home.
The first character we meet is ‘Krish’, their healthcare assistant and the supervisor of the retirement home. He seems to be straight out of the nineteen seventies sitcom, ‘Mind your language’ a bog-standard Indian man, which whilst never a racist portrayal, is extremely cliched and underdeveloped and ‘day one’ of a writer imagining what an Indian man must be like. Krish (played by Yasser Kayani), seems very kindly and sweet but has a bit of an alcohol problem.
Then we are introduced to the four main residents of the retirement home.
Rosemary Broom (played by Josie Ayers). Johnny Copthorne (Craig Crosbie), David Webley (Stephen Omer) Kristin Milward (Mary Wells). Each one, for me, is still in the early drafts of characters seems very cliched and has no real original sparks or ideas. I think all the actors make the most of what they have been given to work with.
Craig Crosbie’s ‘Johnny’ Is obviously a man who has lived a bit of a life and is now in his nineties and meant to be a bit of a letch, he seems to be a blend of the Fast shows ‘old gits’ and The Muppets ‘Statler and Waldorf’. The elephant in the room with his character, is in the 2nd half he, for no apparent reason, plays ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on the bagpipes, my question is, did he learn to play the bagpipes for the part or were they shoe-horned in on his insistence to show off his bag-pipe playing skills? This thought will stay with me for a long time. Stephen Omer’s ‘David’ drifts so close to Alan Bennett at times, that if he got any closer he’d be arrested for impersonating a great Yorkshireman. Mary Wells and Josie Ayers do the most with the basic characters they've been given and hats off to them for that.
There’s a Vietnamese Nurse and a deeply religious South American chef thrown in for good measure, both illegal immigrants looking to get their visas, again both characters are underdeveloped and obvious and surprise surprise, Ashley ends up getting the nurse pregnant and they get married and she turns out to be a bit of ‘a bitch’.
The chef also inexplicably bursts into a religious song to close the first half. Not quite sure what happened there.
To be fair, there are a few funny lines hidden away amongst the confusion and some of the audience seem to really enjoy it, but for me, it is a bit chaotic and way too long.
Peter Hamilton is obviously an experienced writer and has a number of successful plays behind him, so there is lots of respect for him for that, but this feels very much like a first draft of random ideas and character outlines. It could have done, and actually needed, some sympathetic editing before being presented to the general public.
At Theatre at the Tabard until 2 December.
★ ★
