Now that’s an elephant you’ll never forget
The Magician’s Elephant (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: Plot goes on safari ★★★✩✩
THere are two elephants in the royal Shakespeare Company’s big new autumn musical starring Summer Strallen and forbes Masson. One is the elephant on the stage; the other is the elephant in the room.
The former is a terrific life-sized puppet, right up there with Joey in War Horse. The metaphorical one ‘in the room’ is the plot, which seems to have gone on safari.
Based on Kate DiCamillo’s 2009 fantasy novel, the story does pick up after the interval but, for the first half at least, Nancy Harris and Marc Teitler’s adaptation is all dressed up with no place to go.
There is an excess of angst and paradox as our young hero, Peter, struggles to make sense of life in the gloomy, dystopian town of Baltese in the aftermath of a war.
He is promised that ‘profound and difficult questions’ will be answered inside a circus tent, and his tormented opening number runs: ‘if this is true, then everything’s a lie.’
Manning up, he pins his hopes on a memory of being separated at birth from a sister; and he is advised by a fortune-teller that to find her, he needs to follow an elephant that has been accidentally conjured up by an over-eager magician.
As a set-up, it’s somewhat strained; and little else happens in the first hour — apart from townsfolk singing about the elephant and a petulant Countess (Strallen) feeling threatened by the animal’s growing celebrity.
MerCifully, things start to shift in the second half, thanks to the introduction of the missing sister, Adele: a big-hearted, frustrated adventurer shut away in a convent orphanage.
Peter also finally gets to meet the elephant he has been dreaming of and, realising it’s sick, embarks on a mission to find the magician and return it to Africa.
Sarah Tipple’s production packs spectacle and it’s acted and sung with verve and commitment. really, though, it needs a love story, or a more potent point of emotional connection.
Steeped in yellow lighting, the set’s stained ironwork has the look of a Victorian underground station. And although clearly inspired by the work of tortured post-World War i German expressionist painter Otto Dix, the monochrome suits, thickly buttoned greatcoats and elephant prostheses worn by the excited townsfolk are also reminiscent of a Tim Burton film. The best feature by far is the lumbering elephant made with armoured plates, with its cloth ears and doleful eyes.
BuT Teitler’s music never really settles. it works through styles from Kurt Weill dissonance to Sondheim-ish rumination, with touches of comic jazz. in the end, it tries to salvage some Disney-style redemption with the string-drenched Anything Could Happen.
Jack Wolfe, as Peter, looks a great prospect, bringing vulnerability and resolve to the oddly isolated role of the raggedtrousered waif. And as his sister Adele, Miriam Nyarko brings much-needed vitality to the sometimes morose music.
There are broad comic turns, too, from Strallen as the shrill, spoilt brat Countess; and Sam Harrison as her downtrodden husband, The Count Who Doesn’t Count.
Masson lays it on thick as a pinkfaced, twitching, Herbert lomstyle police chief whose truncheon doubles as a hip flask. But none of these comic grotesques, or the sincerity of our leads, are a substitute for a good yarn.
What we really want is not triumph through hardship — we’ve been there and got the jab — but a burst of winter sunshine.