The peculiar thing about the RSC's amiable family show The Magician's Elephant is how short it is of childishness. It is not so much that Sarah Tipple's production has hardly any actual kids, more that it never freewheels; it stands up for magic but does not embrace the absurd. Though often attractive, it is mostly sedate.
Nancy Harris and Marc Teitler's musical adaptation of Kate DiCamillo's 2009 novel shows the inhabitants of a small European city, diminished by recent war, finding new life when a magician conjures up an elephant at the Opera House. Suddenly, it seems there is hope for long-separated siblings and for a couple who (woeful phrase) "keep trying" to have a baby. All the sentiments are sympathetic - and rather too flagged-up: the show sticks up for dreaming and kindness rather than commerce and military harshness; the story is also eco-tinted, as the elephant pines away from her family and her natural environment.
The creature brings a thrill to the stage, with her ears wrinkled like old parchment and her heavy but graceful sway
It is hard for a puppet pachyderm to measure up to the mighty Sultan's Elephant made by Royal de Luxe that sashayed through London in 2006, but the creature (greeted as "Madame") designed by Tracy Waller and Mervyn Millar - and manipulated by Zoe Halliday, Wela Mbusi and Suzanne Nixon - brings a thrill to the stage, with her ears wrinkled like old parchment and her heavy but graceful sway. Oliver Fenwick's lighting design, mostly sepulchral, provides a particular kind of stage magic, summoning up the creature and eventually making her vanish while in full sight as the audience are dazzled by lights.
Madame is the high point, but it takes far too long for her to arrive. The narrative is flabby, with more set-up than action and with music that trundles and scurries, often with a train rhythm, rarely exploring or lingering in the ear. The stage is adult-heavy, with comic, rather than funny, policemen, a Cruella villainess and a soldier with PTSD.
Jack Wolfe - sweet-voiced, pixie-like but resolute - gets the hero just right, with Miriam Nyarko beautifully forthright as his lost sister "Adele the Brave". Sam Harrison is outstanding as a twirling fop, who in the best song of the show describes himself as "the count who doesn't count, the title no one reads". These are bright sparks, but not enough to make a blaze.
In 2019, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm gave the West End a shaking with Emilia, commissioned by Michelle Terry for the Globe; a rallying cry to feminists and a sceptical account of accepted history, it brought audiences to their feet. Her new look at received views of women's lives is inward, contemporary, an account of the terrors experienced by someone who has recently become a mother.
As someone who is herself not a mother, but who did have one, Mum offered me one of the particular excitements of the theatre: that of leaping into someone else's experience. I have read many descriptions of postnatal anguish; Sophie Melville's performance gives the horrors an extra dimension of physicality.
Arms stretched wide, face pulled taut, she wheels round the stage as if she were being punched by an invisible fist. Dismantled by tiredness, her eyes glitter narrowly. She turns on herself: "Who'd give a baby to you?" She turns on the women around her: friend, professional, her own mother, a mother-in-law who appears alternately hostile and helpful; these parts are ably divvied up between Cat Simmons and Denise Black. Nightmare and daily life become indistinguishable for protagonist and audience: what presents itself as a raw blurt is actually a carefully steered series of surprises.
Marsha Norman's maternally inflected play has a different explicitness. Staged to mark Hampstead's commitment to European premieres of American plays, 'Night, Mother was first seen at the theatre in 1985, a year after the end of its Broadway run. Intent, plot and circumstance are throughout laid bare, sometimes boldly, sometimes absurdly: "You are my child," a mother points out to her daughter.
This daughter declares she is going to kill herself. She has had enough: her epilepsy has been regarded as a sign of derangement; her husband has left; her son has turned to drugs and crime; world politics are threatening. She is calm, methodical, meticulous; as eager to ensure her mother is well supplied with fudge as she is to check the bullets for her gun. Her mother will have to cope - with the knowledge and the event.
So far, so cutting, and Roxana Silbert's production has the allure of a contained and bewildered Stockard Channing and Rebecca Night, resolute and bleak as the daughter. Ti Green's design - brown wheel-backed chairs, crocheted sunflower placemats - captures the terrifying naturalism of Norman's dialogue. The price of this explicitness is a sluggish pace. Anger and distress descend out of the blue (Channing makes a lot of rigid jabbing gestures), without much sense of inner propulsion or of any countercurrent to what is stated. Here is an interesting kernel, but not an evening's worth of drama. In 1983, 'Night, Mother won both the Pulitzer prize and the Susan Smith Blackburn award. The runner-up for the latter was Caryl Churchill's prescient Top Girls. That placing now looks absurd.
Star ratings (out of five) The Magician's Elephant ???
Star ratings (out of five)
The Magician's Elephant
Mum ???
'Night Mother ???
The Magician's Elephant is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 1 January
Mum is at the Soho theatre, London W1, until 20 November
'Night, Mother is at the Hampstead theatre, London NW3, until 4 December