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    The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man (NHB Modern Plays)
    The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man (NHB Modern Plays)
    The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man (NHB Modern Plays)
    Ebook96 pages55 minutes

    The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man (NHB Modern Plays)

    By Tom Wright

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    About this ebook

    Arriving from his East Midlands beginnings into a London thick with the grime of industrialisation, Joseph Merrick is an anomaly. In a city of factories that churn out uniformity, there is no place for someone like him.
    But Merrick and the city are evolving into something new. We follow him through the workhouse, the freak show, and the hospital, as he searches for acceptance in a society that just wants to stare at him.
    Powerful, angry and surprising, Tom Wright's acclaimed play imagines an alternative history of the person who came to be known as 'the Elephant Man'. It restores Joseph Merrick to the center of his own story: a man fighting for his right to be and to belong.
    The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man was first performed at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre, before receiving its European premiere at Nottingham Playhouse in 2023, directed by Stephen Bailey, and supported by a grant from The Royal Theatrical Support Trust.
    'A challenging, moving play about spectacle, difference and identity'Limelight Magazine
    'Everyone should be moved by such poetic and accomplished theatre'The Age
    'Astonishing… it's doubtful whether there has ever been a better example of theatre's ability to be inclusive at the same time as being able to shock'British Theatre Guide
    'A powerful piece of theatre'Reviews Hub
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateSep 21, 2023
    ISBN9781788506977
    The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man (NHB Modern Plays)

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      Book preview

      The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man (NHB Modern Plays) - Tom Wright

      Tom Wright

      THE REAL & IMAGINED

      HISTORY OF

      THE ELEPHANT MAN

      NICK HERN BOOKS

      London

      www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

      Contents

      Introduction

      Original Production Details

      Characters

      Suggested Role Allocations

      Note on the Dialogue

      The Real & Imagined History of the Elephant Man

      About the Author

      Copyright and Performing Rights Information

      Introduction

      Tom Wright

      This is an attempt to write a theatre-poem about the City and the Body. In the case of Joseph Merrick, the two seem closely linked – Joseph was a product of the industrial Midlands, growing up in the pollution and close confines of Leicester. The architecture was that of terraced housing, brick privies, cigar factories, chimneys, mills, workhouses. And when destitute he was taken to the great metropolis, exhibited in the haze and smog of the East End, another curio in a city that was bulging with excess; the centre of empire, of industry, of science. There are two main characters, in so far as there are characters: there’s Joseph himself, glimpsed in twenty fragments of a real and imagined life. A one-off, a prize, an anomaly. And there’s London, a big machine, breathing, coughing, spewing smoke and steam as it endlessly churns out simulacra.

      *

      1888. In the same East End, the Bryant and May match girls were on strike; the use of white phosphorous in their repetitive labour led to ‘Phossy Jaw’, a disease which caused the mandible to swell and abscess, the mutant growths glowing in the dark. The strike drove many to destitution; women were seen wandering the lanes with what seemed beards of bone and skin extending from their faces. Mass production, big business, disfigurement, difference. Modernity was changing cities, changing bodies. Joseph eked out his days in his cell at the hospital, making his cardboard models of cathedrals, taking tea with aristocrats, while on the other side of Whitechapel Road, women were being found with their innards strewn on the pavement. One of the Ripper murders took place within screaming distance of Joseph’s window.

      *

      The authorised version of Joseph’s story comes to us from Frederick Treves, surgeon and gentleman, who discreetly casts himself as Joseph’s saviour, interpreter, even his friend. Unfortunately, he never seems to get Joseph’s first name right and keeps referring to him as ‘John’. For Treves, Joseph is a cipher, a passive patient on which can be inscribed a great man’s genius and charity. In the famous 1970s play, Joseph seems to become a parable of gay male coming-out. David Lynch, in the 1980s, fashions the story into an ironic take on high humanism (I am not an animal. I am a human being), casting Joseph as an innocent, trapped in the monstrosity of childhood. Lynch has Joseph’s death as an act of trying to imitate a print of a sleeping child on his wall, he curls up as if about to re-enter a womb. It’s mawkish and cloying, but there’s something about it that rings true. A Peter Pan from the Id, perhaps.

      *

      In this imagining, Joseph realises he’s being killed by kindness. The hospital is both his salvation and his tomb. He knows his world isn’t real, he is utterly dependent on his nurses and

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