Anoushka Lucas sat at piano in Elephant at Menier Chocolate Factory. Credit Manuel HarlanEnter into that realm the excessively talented writer, composer and performer, Oxford educated Anoushka Lucas. Her straight-through piece ELEPHANT which now enjoys a run at Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre, has previously impressed audiences and critics alike, at the Bush in West London. In it, the artist delivers a stream of engaging, informative and downright unsettling vignettes in which she draws on her own life experience as the daughter of an Anglo-Indian father and a French Cameroonian mother, growing-up in London where she attends a posh school on a scholarship (The French Lycée in Kensington), yet lives in a council flat.
There is a gradual build in Lucas’s delivery of relatively innocent school experiences tinged with the cruelty of children, interspersed with anecdotes of first love (with impressively talented, posh middle-class musician Leo). Details of a more harrowing nature emerge as she unflinchingly walks us through the painful process of tusk removal from the soft inner parts of an elephant’s face. The unsentimental delivery leaves little to the imagination before she sprawls languorously across the slowly revolving piano at the centre of the playing area, from where she delivers another of her insightful songs in a vocal tone both redolent of Carole King and Helen Reddy.
This is socially aware theatre delivered with gentle observational humour, tinged with the unmistakable bitterness of harsh personal experience. In particular, an eruption at the country home of her well-to-do boyfriend’s parents, creates a starkly sobering rebuke to complacency. We hear repeated recordings in which the young woman before us is coaxed (by unseen, blinkered, record company execs) to play-up her ethnic credentials as a marketable quality. Her justifiable fury and frustration is borne of a realisation that up to this point in her life, she has been actively encouraged to do the opposite, capitalising on social mobility by emphasising her white middle class-ness. Is it any wonder that as a nation we wave flags to excess, yet pervade a collective identity crisis?
Gently glowing lights are ranged around the playing area, which change colour in support of the mood as the individual story elements are revealed. Developed and directed by Jess Edwards, there is a real sense of collaboration and exploration of the material, which whilst ostensibly personal, contains many recognisable themes which will have a universal resonance.
The intimate and thought provoking show plays to 29 June and is highly recommended.
