The Magician’s Elephant — a puppet pachyderm comes to life in the RSC’s new musical

The Magician’s Elephant

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

You won’t forget the star of The Magician’s Elephant in a hurry. A life-sized puppet pachyderm with wise, melancholy eyes and ears that seem to ripple with a life of their own, she sways across the stage, bringing a sad, sweet centre of gravity to this new Royal Shakespeare Company family musical about a lonely boy who spies a kindred spirit in a lost African elephant.

She’s a beauty, set surely to join the pantheon of stellar puppet animals along with Joey, the equine star of War Horse, and Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger holding the stage in Life of Pi (about to open in London’s West End). And, like every elephant in a room, she stands for something even bigger than herself: here it is a sense of loss, longing and grief that has paralysed the war-torn fictional town of Baltese and left its citizens divided from themselves and each other.

The musical by Nancy Harris (book and lyrics) and Marc Teitler (music and lyrics), set around a century ago and drawn from Kate DiCamillo’s fantastical 2009 novel, was meant to open last year. Now it finally makes the stage after the pandemic-enforced hiatus, its depiction of ground-down individuals longing for something magic has new force. An early song in which the company wistfully sing of a time before hits home, as do some of the messages coursing through the story about kindness, compassion, community and not seeking your own happiness at someone else’s expense.

We start in the doldrums. Weariness grips the citizens of Baltese as they plod the streets of their gloomy town, chanting “Discipline, control, routine”. Imaginative orphan Peter Duchene feels out of place, perturbed by dreams of his lost baby sister and uncomfortable with the strict regime implemented by his guardian (Mark Meadows), an ex-soldier traumatised by the war. Things look bleak.

But then. A local conjuror muddles his magic and accidentally summons a huge female elephant on to the opera house stage, causing delight and consternation in equal measure. Her presence sends Baltese into a frenzy. The police chief tries to arrest her; the toffs try to make money out of her; the merchants shift into on-trend elephant-themed produce. Only Peter, convinced that the elephant can lead him to his sister, stops to wonder what the animal herself might need.

There’s a fairytale element to the show and a nod towards the RSC’s house playwright in the poignant plotline of parted siblings finding one another. Sarah Tipple’s production is gorgeously designed by Colin Richmond, with imposing wrought-iron platforms and delightful steampunk props, and studded with enjoyable performances. Sam Harrison’s hen-pecked Count delivers a witty lament about being “The Count Who Doesn’t Count”; Forbes Masson’s police chief enjoyably channels ridiculous cops through the ages; Marc Antolin brings warmth and depth to Matienne, a police officer with a poet’s soul — there’s a lovely, gentle trio between him, his wife (Melissa James) and Peter about daring to hope.

There’s much to cherish, then. And, giving the elephant (and her operators, Zoe Halliday, Wela Mbusi and Suzanne Nixon) a run for her money as the human star of the show is Jack Wolfe’s excellent Peter. In a beautifully charismatic performance, he combines delicate vulnerability with a sense of fierce integrity and drive.

Yet the show doesn’t quite pull together. It’s feels very overloaded — it runs at two hours 45 minutes — and it raises more issues than it can work through, which muffles what it is saying. The timely ecological concern gets little space and the central sibling story is buried in a host of other developments. The first half in particular is weighed down with back-plot and scene-setting, leading to a tendency to push the comedy too hard to create a sense of momentum. It’s a beguiling piece of theatre, laced with talent but, like the elephant at its centre, it needs more room to breathe.

★★★☆☆

To January 1, rsc.org.uk

’Night, Mother

Hampstead Theatre, London

The kitchen clock is ticking quietly as the lights go up on Marsha Norman’s ’Night, Mother. It’s just a regular Saturday night in for mother and daughter Thelma and Jessie, as they potter about in Thelma’s small house in rural America. Thelma is fretting about Hershey bars and peanut brittle; Jessie is placating her mama while hunting for old towels.

Nothing remarkable to see, then, until — within minutes of the play opening — Jessie calmly announces that she intends to kill herself this evening. From then on, that ticking clock becomes a focus of increasing panic, as Thelma tries every ploy she can to dissuade her: the petty — “You can’t use my towels!”; the moral — “It’s a sin”; the emotional blackmail — “You’re my child.”

The stakes couldn’t be much higher. And this revival of Norman’s 1982 drama has tempted leading American actor Stockard Channing to London to pay Thelma. You want to applaud her, together with the playwright and the director Roxana Silbert, for addressing such a serious subject. Yet the result is an oddly muted affair. The play covers a lot of ground, gradually sketching in the family failures and medical history that have led to this point, examining the mother-daughter relationship and weaving in Jessie’s arguments.

There is a curious lack of jeopardy or gravity. For all the precise naturalism of Ti Green’s set, the arguments feel more theoretical than convincing and the emotions strangely stilted. Channing is compelling to watch, but her character feels detached — she throws some pans around at one point and has a great tirade towards the end, but it’s hard to believe she is really confronted by this harrowing situation. Rebecca Night’s Jessie has a quiet calm and composure as she methodically runs through her list of preparations. But she has nowhere to develop to and the whole piece feels very static and remote. This is a revival that hasn’t stood the test of time.

★★☆☆☆

To December 4, hampsteadtheatre.com

Brian & Roger — A Highly Offensive Play

Menier Chocolate Factory, London

Another unhappy couple are the focus of Brian & Roger — A Highly Offensive Play, which opens the Menier Chocolate Factory’s new studio space. Based on the popular podcasts of the same name by Dan Skinner and Harry Peacock, this comic two-hander charts the increasingly fraught relationship between a pair of divorced fathers who meet at a support group and develop a toxic co-dependency.

The comic potential lies in the mismatch — Roger is charmingly hapless, hopeless and gullible; Brian is a manipulative chancer — and in the fact that out of a nub of emotional truth, the pair weave improbably farcical predicaments, charted through voicemail messages. In the podcast, improvised by the two writers, we hear Brian gradually sweet-talk his friend into exploitative situations while the show as a whole deals with masculinity. Opened out for the stage, the premise works much less well.

Skinner makes an amiable and painfully trusting Roger; Simon Lipkin (stepping in for Peacock for medical reasons) is agreeably loathsome as the slippery, self-absorbed Brian. But the format, with the two men still communicating by voicemail, becomes constraining and the comedy soon feels thin and forced. Instead of character development, we get progressively manic scenarios, eventually resorting to gags about offal and worse.

David Babani’s ingenious direction uses every inch of the space and Timothy Bird’s witty projection work transports us everywhere from a municipal dump to an ancient Chinese village. But it’s not enough to keep this unfortunate show airborne.

★★☆☆☆

 To December 18, menierchocolatefactory.com