Psychiatric wards have provided a rich source of material for writers and dramatists over the decades, but in a world where our mental health and well-being are discussed and evaluated more openly than at any time in human history, does Nicholas Billon’s psychological drama THE ELEPHANT SONG have anything interesting to say to a modern audience?Unfortunately, despite the occasional witty one-liners, the answer is a resounding no, due in no small part to the societal change in perceptions towards mental health which have taken place over the past 10 years. As directed by Jason Moore on the small stage at Park Theatre, the actors do their damnedest to make the best of the material — which would be more easily achieved were the production less self-conscious in its delivery of a disturbed young patient being evaluated by the stressed and overworked director of an institution, following the sudden disappearance of the lad’s usual handler.
Gwithian Evans as the manipulative, hyper-intelligent, soft-toy-clutching inmate Michael, Jon Osbaldeston the fractious and understandably impatient Dr Greenberg and Louise Faulkner as Miss Peterson the play’s nurse/surrogate mother figure, give voice to the protagonists and do well to deliver the playwright’s oft-amusing word-play, but they are also charged with breathing life into the inevitable clunky clichés and an awkwardly unsatisfactory attempt at a tidily melodramatic ending.
We’re in an office where a psychiatrist’s desk is adorned with a Newton’s Cradle and walls hung with Rothko and Rorschach prints. It is here we learn that the young man’s mother was an internationally renowned but self-absorbed grand opera singer (a kitschy detail supported by the playing of a snippet of O mio babbino caro), who fell pregnant to a South African big game hunter! One wonders if the writer ever stopped to ask himself whether he was stretching an audience’s credulity one Serengeti sunset too far, by allowing himself to tip-toe self-indulgently into the pastiche realm of Coward meets Hemingway. Alas on press night, the evidence was before us and no matter how measured and nuanced the performances, sadly the plot progression felt wobbly and the characters’ back stories wobblier still. Deviant deviations — in the form of sordid Polaroids in a locked desk drawer — and a cliffhanger which hinged on whether a medico would or would not read a patient’s file notes, served as obfuscation but little else in a disappointingly unsatisfying evening.
Holiday friendships (especially those made on a cruise ship) aren’t meant to go beyond the holiday, right? Everybody knows that. It’s one of those dependable unwritten rules! Unless that is, you are Elsa Jean Krakowski, a brash American widow and Trump-devotee from Denver, with something of a disturbing history, who has just emailed to advise she’s standing outside your front door.