Verse:
Dangel, Leo
nate John Merrick. No actor could, without ludicrous makeup ently answering, yes, to Merrick's question: does a man have more appropriate to a Star Wars saloon than a serious play. to...
...In a die shortly, that his heart cannot bear the weight of his grotesmarvelous extension of the conventional collusion of actor and que body, so that his death when it comes will raise no audience which allows a performer to become a character, questions, will be recognized as suicide only by the audience...
...Finally to pure silence felt As my own metamorphosis (the transformation of a play In the hands and shoulder blades...
...of the play is only an object of curiosity (idle to freak-show Shortly before, he puts the tower on the church model he has fanciers, scientific to Treves), becomes a normal person of been constructing-a mock building made by a mock mansorts...
...And work is being done...
...Kendal-a beautifully acted scene between genteel than the mob who would have destroyed him to erase Anglim and Carole Shelley-and that much of his later distress the difference...
...plays, one dramatic, one didactic...
...No actor could, without ludicrous makeup ently answering, yes, to Merrick's question: does a man have more appropriate to a Star Wars saloon than a serious play...
...great sensitivity brought to the threshold of life and then forced Drinking the moon to turn back...
...points against society...
...Even so, I have I am with the earth and the dark, some difficulty with it...
...This is the segment of the English public more meets Mrs...
...He insists that Merrick repeat after him, Swells beneath the tractor "Rules make us happy...
...No longer considered a cretin, Mer- death are not left to work as dramatic metaphor...
...Echoes carry us back to the end of Treves at London Hospital, which becomes his home (the the first act in which he explains to Mrs...
...Fourth metamorphosis...
...Yet his face, Early in the act Merrick tells Mrs...
...into a series of propositions) suggests, The Elephant Man is a fascinating drama full of provocative ideas...
...This is presented in very specific speeches in which each of the characters describes Merrick in a line that ends "like me...
...After' a mob almost kills him, he finds shelter with and says, "It's finished...
...Yet, as Dr...
...He Plowing at Full Moon rescues Merrick from destruction but forces him to fit his The air, cold, freakishness (i.e., difference) into n paradigm of nineteenth- The hills roll up like unbroken century propriety...
...Anglim turns into the horribly deformed Merrick...
...Kendal that Romeo word is spoken as though it were in quotation marks) after a had to kill himself because his illusion came to an end...
...By the The plow turning a wake end of the play, Treves doubts his work, his God, his society, Wet and black his whole existence...
...Frederick Treves (Kevin Conway) lectures us, Kendal as she shows Merrick what a naked woman looks like, using actual photographs of the elephant man, Anglim's right his outrage is a display of his own limitations although Merrick arm appears to elongate, becoming heavy and useless, his takes it as a definition of his...
...In so far as The Elephant I'll go home and dream of a horse Man is the story of John Merrick, it is the account of a man of Bowing over still water in a cedar tank...
...Merrick, who in the early sections freak borrowed from the first act, he does lie down and he dies...
...They are for our own good...
...Pomerance uses sex as the final barrier, appar30 March 1979: 181...
...For one thing, it appears to be two Alone...
...to have a woman to be a man...
...For his new friends, show me...
...they become rick develops his taste for art and literature, allows his imagi- part of an overt lesson plan which seems-at least that is the nation to flourish, even displays his talent for irony...
...lines on role-playing, Merrick becomes the newest fashion, Brecht is not a bad playwright for a man to get under his skin, visited, admired, befriended (condescended to) by the elegant but even with Brecht I sometimes want to say, don't tell me, world, from Princess Alexandra down...
...Kendal that he must sleep unlike Merrick's, remains unchanged, so that the audience can sitting up, that if he lies down as other people do he will at once perceive the man and the freak...
...When Treves interrupts Mrs...
...We are warned that Merrick will body twists, his legs grow clumpish, difficult to manage...
...strangle...
...Frederick Treves is presented as an Leo Dangel intelligent, compassionate man of science, a product of both the rationality Vnd the missionary zeal of his century...
...seeing him as an individual, which allows them to find in him GERALD WEALES the qualities that they think or wish were theirs...
...is underlined by too obvious explanation...
...subscription, raised through The Times, proves that, as the The difficulty with Merrick's story in dramatic terms is that scene title puts it, "the English public will pay for him to be it reaches its emotional high point in the first act when Merrick like us...
...Merrick's life and Third metamorphosis...
...Still, The Elephant Man's telling takes place in the Merrick's ugliness is a value, a barrier which keeps them from context of some highly effective showing...
...The play is in danger of becoming a Kendal, whose presence allows Pomerance some attractive lecture like the one that Treves dreams at the end of the play...
...When one thinks of the real Sir Frederick Treves, placidly churning out travel essays toward the end of A column of fire gusts his life, Pomerance's Treves becomes as obvious an invention Up from the exhaust, the roar as his Merrick, a product of the same impulse that created the Breaks through tortured psychiatrist of Equus...
...After way I read the Treves character-to want to score particular winning the interest and the affection of the celebrated Mrs...
...Now, at the invitation of a fantasy figurer, another Second metamorphosis...
Vol. 106 • March 1979 • No. 6
