Perhaps you were hoping for a live-action adaptation of Babar? Or maybe a portrait of some brave anti-ivory crusader? Sorry to disappoint. Instead it’s another revival of Bernard Pomerance’s 1979 play about a Victorian cause celebre, famous for his deformities. As this is Broadway, who do you get to play John Merrick, the Elephant Man of the title? Why, Bradley Cooper, People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive”, of course.
To the producers’ credit, Cooper has had an abiding interest in the play: he played the role in graduate school and again in Williamstown in 2012. His portrayal at first seems tiresomely showy, the kind of acting that demands the audience acknowledge and applaud each drop of sweat trickling from the thespian brow. But after a scene or two, he settles into the part and he settles in very nicely.
As the script demands, Cooper declines makeup and prosthetics. Instead he contorts both his body (unsteadying his gait and skewing his shoulders) and his face (squinching his mouth to one side and misaligning the muscles of his cheek and jaw) to suggest Merrick’s form. He makes himself almost unrecognisable – aurally, too, as he layers his speech with gasps and catches and gulps as Merrick struggles to speak through his misshapen lips. If Cooper doesn’t eclipse John Hurt in David Lynch’s film version, he gives a bravura performance and occasionally quite a moving one. He might as well clear trophy space on his mantel now.
But the play that surrounds him has come to seem somewhat brittle and artificial. A biographical work, it begins in the 1880s as Frederick Treves (a capable Alessandro Nivola) hears of a remarkable creature exhibited by a dissolute showman, and pays to examine him at the hospital. When do-gooders prevent Merrick exhibiting himself further, Treves brings him to the hospital to live, providing him with good food, clean clothes, regular baths and high-class companionship, particularly in the willowy form of Mrs Kendal (a somewhat vacant Patricia Clarkson), an actor who takes an interest in his condition.
Pomerance alternates the facts of Merrick’s life with some pretty speechifying and a little philosophy. Merrick’s extraordinary appearance takes him outside the bounds of ordinary social intercourse and so he becomes, for everyone who sees him, a sort of sympathetic mirror, reflecting back only the best parts of themselves. Merrick’s ugliness is both repulsive and attractive, allowing those around him to confirm their own tolerance, their own normality.
As a meditation on disability it’s a lot more sophisticated than what’s on offer just up the road in Side Show, but under Scott Ellis’s brisk, stylish and slightly hollow direction, the ideas never seem emotionally connected to the experience of the characters. The dramatic events – a crisis of confidence and conscience for Treves, a scandal involving an uncorseted Mrs Kendal – seem obvious contrivance on the part of the playwright rather than incidents demanded by character and circumstance.
And yet what does that matter? Well before opening, the show had set box-office records. So step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see something that will astonish and amaze you: a bona fide Hollywood star in nothing but his skivvies. Really, why bother with a play at all?
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