![]() ![]() (The production officially opened Sunday night at the Booth Theatre, where its original incarnation premiered 35 years ago, and where I caught a preview performance last week. ![]() 25 - is not available to talk much about himself at the moment, being in the midst of starring in The Elephant Man eight times a week on Broadway. Why? Because the 39-year-old star of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper - a harrowing portrait of the life of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who was the most effective American sniper during the Iraq War, which Warner Bros. His negligence in failing to diagnose Merrick's true malady and his own malaise is an underplayed tragedy in this dreary drama.Allow me to take a moment to talk about Bradley Cooper. Treves remains an enigma here, merely a bit of a prig with a worried frown on his face. Instead, the script is weighed down with an overdose of narrative and fails to give interest to the character of Frederick Treves, the eminent Victorian surgeon who rescued Merrick from a mob at Liverpool Street station, took him in at the London hospital and advanced his own career along the way. This is, after all, a story in which appearances are both proved and disproved as being everything. Pomerance's play could do with much less talk of the nature of illusion and reality, and a good deal more of this kind of visual poetry. Not many men are crushed quite so literally by the immensity of their own dreams. A few years later, the weight of that misshapen head would asphyxiate him in his sleep. "I sometimes think that my head is so big, because it is so full of dreams," he declares. ![]() He gives a powerful, dignified performance as the man whose body and misshapen features caused women to faint, but whose mind was alert in an age when deformity was believed to be a sign of inner ugliness. While his colleagues fail to thrill, Marc Pickering as Merrick is the exception on the acting front. ![]() The play is absurdly literal in its excavation of the story, whereas David Lynch's fabulous black-and-white 1980 movie version understood that it is not just Merrick's appearance, but Victorian London's own Jekyll and Hyde nature that is the really terrifying monster lurking in the psyche. J ohn Merrick was the so-called "Elephant Man" first displayed in Victorian freakshows for a penny's entrance fee, who spent the rest of his life at the London hospital, where he became a curiosity visited by royalty and the rich and famous.īernard Pomerance's play helped Merrick's story become widely known, but this 30-year-old drama is now looking creaky and old-fashioned, particularly in this awkward, often indifferently acted production by Bruce Guthrie, which is ill-suited to the squashed Studio 2 space. ![]()
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