On Stage
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage THE PARABLE MAKER BY DEAN VALENTINE he most striking feature about him was his enormous and misshapen head. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from...
...Summarily dismissed, he pleads with Treves and Carr Gomm for his job: He has a wife and family, and they need the money...
...it was written by Dr...
...and most importantly, he now had the chance to be "normal...
...above all, the hospital staff must never gape at their charge but always be polite and deferential...
...After rescuing him from this degradation, Treves, condescendingly compassionate, decides to create for Merrick the illusion of normalcy...
...There are also traces here of Michel Foucault and the Brecht of A Man 'sA Man and The Elephant Calf...
...Now all he has left is art— specifically, the wooden model he has been building of St...
...Outraged at this scandalous impropriety, he orders her out, thereby closing Merrick off from his single source of genuine human contact...
...He is, in short, the prototypical English bourgeois of the 19th century...
...John Merrick dies a tragic victim, crucified on this dilemma...
...At the height of his dissociation, he has a nightmare where he is the freak, and Merrick is the doctor analyzing him before a group of physicians...
...He gives us an imposing, stolid Victorian, but is unconvincing in scenes demanding a display of emotion...
...The Elephant Man hinges on the strange interplay between Treves and Merrick: As the deformed man grows more eager to be "like everybody else," the doctor's notion of what is normal is gradually subverted...
...He is not made up to look like The Elephant Man...
...she comes to see him often...
...he is extremely smart as well, possessed of an intelligence unpolluted by culture...
...If he's talented and determined enough, he tells us, he'll be able to charge 100 guinea fees before he's 40...
...When he speaks, his halting English seems to arrive as speech only after surfacing through thick layers of pain...
...Kendal as cute, something that a dear little boy might say...
...Through this project, Merrick hopes to capture in his soul the beauty that God denied him in his body...
...Well, it is because they are for our own good...
...Society, in their view, is based on coercion, on taking advantage of people's differences or weaknesses to make them conform...
...The description is of the Englishman John Merrick, a feral freak and perhaps the ugliest human being in history...
...instead, he suggests the deformation solely through the contortion of muscles...
...They make us happy...
...Romeo, in other words, is in love with love and not with a real person...
...The drama opens with Treves' address to the audience, wherein he presents himself as committed to rationalism, to a sympathetic attitude and to making a good living in a socially approved way...
...Like a man painting the inside of a bird cage to resemble the leaves of a tree, thereby convincing the bird that it occupies the space nature intended for it, Treves orders everyone around Merrick to ignore the deformity...
...Bernard Pomerance, a young American playwright living in London, has taken the bare facts of this story (recounted by Ashley Montagu in The Elephant Man and by Leslie Fiedler in Freaks) and transmuted it through the alembic of his imagination...
...T JL...
...As part of his effort to make Merrick feel like one of the gang, Treves convinces a famous actress, Mrs...
...The chairman of the institution, Dr...
...No, he would have put a mirror to her face to discern whether or not she was breathing...
...all he sees is a reflection of himself...
...The themes Pomerance explores— that pity, society and its moral imperatives, and the idea of normalcy are in fact harmful illusions—are developed in the next scene...
...Richard Carr is appropriately cold and dependable as Gomm, and I.M...
...Treves, meanwhile, has himself come to question the principles by which he and his society get along...
...Pitted against the unreality beginning to wind its way round The Elephant Man like a snake are Art and Love...
...He had a comfortable home, of a kind...
...And do you know why we must obey the Rules...
...he Elephant Man owes a great deal to Romanticism...
...Philip's Church...
...Policemen bash him with clubs—as if such cruelty could deny the horror—and even the fat and filthy keeper who displays him at freak shows treats him worse than a dog, steals his money, and finally abandons him when there is no more profit to be made...
...Merrick is engaged in precisely such a struggle...
...John Merrick died happily in 1890...
...With one foot on the edge of Victorian society and the other in raw, inhuman nature, he cannot walk the streets without being mobbed, so hideous is he to look at...
...The circumference of the head was no less than that of a man's waist...
...She introduces him to the high-born, among them the heir apparent to the throne and Princess Alexandra...
...To protect him against such indecent exploitation and to better study him, Treves took the unfortunate Merrick to the London Hospital...
...taken by his intelligence and dignity, and fascinated by his monstrous appearance, well-heeled Victorians came to visit him, preferring expensive gifts...
...Man, in Romantic doctrine, is an outcast...
...At first overwhelmed by his ugliness, she is barely able to utter a few pleasantries without retching...
...The comment, naturally, strikes Mrs...
...It is a scene of unparalleled loveliness and force, concentrating in one magnificent, heart breaking exchange Pomerance's point: When the illusion of normalcy shatters, Merrick too must die...
...and she takes him for picnics in the country...
...I was not impressed by Kevin Conway (Treves...
...the gloomy setting by David Jenkins, and the bittersweet cello music was arranged and is elegantly played by David Heiss...
...From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from the back of the head hung a bag of spongy, fungus-looking skin, the surface of which was comparable to a brown cauliflower...
...It protruded from the mouth like a pink stump, turning the upper lip inside out and making of the mouth a mere slobbering aperture...
...Frederick Treves, who in 1886 discovered the viciously abused Merrick in a side show, where he was billed as "The Elephant Man...
...The face was no more capable of expression than a block of gnarled wood...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, among the most potent subthemes in the play is Imperialism: Just as England must assume the burden of the inferior black man (for his own good), so must Treves assume the burden of the Elephant Man...
...The Beauty and the Beast relationship between him and Mrs...
...The faultless direction is by Jack Hofsiss...
...Philip Anglim (Merrick) did impress me, though...
...Carr Gomm, raised enough money by public subscription to keep The Elephant Man comfortably installed for life...
...Kendal grows deeper, as genuine love on her part displaces her social-worker's affection...
...When the illusion ends," Merrick concludes, "he must kill himself...
...Ripped off in a fraudulent investment scheme, unable to make a medical diagnosis of The Elephant Man's condition, aware that to him and his eminent Victorian friends Merrick is simply an object, realizing that his England oppresses others as it seeks pleasure in the guise of rectitude, Treves starts coming apart...
...AskingTreves why the attendant was fired he receives the reply that it was done out of mercy...
...But presently it dawns on her that she and Merrick have one thing in common—they display themselves to a public that is oblivious to their true selves...
...She also discovers that Merrick is not only extraordinarily gentle...
...What happens if the rules are traduced is illustrated when a hospital orderly is discovered staring at Merrick...
...redemption is possible only by an effort of the purified imagination—through art, love or revolution, he can transcend his hideous condition and achieve the Unity that once existed between him, his inner self, other men, and Nature...
...The roles have been reversed, and in Treves' imagination, the emotional truth that we all recognize watching this play—that the essence of man lies outside the institutions that surround him—is vividly incarnated...
...Yet Pomerance's vision is in the final reckoning unique...
...At the same time, the doctor instructs Merrick on the conditions for membership in the Victorian club (I paraphrase): "We must always obey the Rules, musn't we...
...The osseous growth on the forehead almost occluded one eye...
...The result is theatrical gold—one of the most moving, original plays in a decade...
...He is at pains to show and tell us that Merrick was not even conscious of his suffering before coming to the hospital and entering the Great World...
...Kendal ("You're used to hiding your real emotions"), to engage The Elephant Man in conversation...
...Hobson carries off his three comic parts with panache...
...Discussing Romeo and Juliet, Merrick remarks that if he had been Romeo, he never would have been fooled by Juliet's mock death...
...Merrick, of course, is anything but...
...Kendal), in an equally bravura performance, begins as a witty woman of the world and ends transformed by powers she never knew existed...
...Carole Shelley (Mrs...
...Thus, to The Elephant Man, his present bondage—similar in many respects to the ill-treatment and humilation he received in his freak days—is nevertheless preferable...
...On Stage THE PARABLE MAKER BY DEAN VALENTINE he most striking feature about him was his enormous and misshapen head...
...The argument is to no avail: He has violated the illusion Treves is trying to conjure, violated the laid down law, and he must pay for it...
...Then Merrick goes on: "The illusion fools Romeo because he doesn't care about Juliet, only about himself...
...For it is, first and foremost, a parable about the Fall of Natural Man—whose attempt to realize himself is obviated by society and its conventions...
...But just as she and the overwhelmed Merrick are about to touch hands, Treves breaks in...
...The acting is as good as the play, which is to say, it resonates in the memory...
...At the core of the author's imagination, then, lies this paradox: Life in society is a lie, a travesty, while life outside of it is a terrible, unthinking darkness—absolute negation...
...Merrick, however, is not yet corrupted by this well-orchestrated show, as he will be later when his passion for normalcy becomes dominant...
...From the upper jaw there projected another mass of bone...
...For Merrick the circumstances were comparatively idyllic...
...Eventually, the intimate friendship turns sexual...
...If your mercy is so cruel," says Merrick, "what do you have for justice...
...After he tells her his one unfulfilled desire is to see a woman naked, she removes her bodice, striking the pose of a Victorian goddess...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 10
