Elephant – Bush Theatre, London

Writer: Anoushka Lucas

Director: Jess Edwards

Elephant is a one-woman musical starring Anoushka Lucas, who writes, sings, plays the piano and acts. It comes together beautifully.

Lylah is a woman with a very mixed heritage, who falls in love with the piano when one is lowered into her house at the age of eight. She attends a French Lycée on a scholarship and is pushed to be all-good all the time. As an adult, she struggles with music industry typecasting and falls in love with a skilled musician from a privileged upbringing. Throughout, there’s (part of) an elephant in the room and it lurks on the piano’s keyboard.

Lucas is a fantastic physical performer. Split between 2017 and 1998, her whole body and mannerisms change when she’s playing an eight-year-old. While the year is projected on the floor, it’s not needed, as her ramrod straight back and eager energy project the sense of a keen, excitable child while her slumpier shoulders show a more contained, awkward adult.

Lucas also handles the music very well. The songs are in a range of styles, with an adult-contemporary sort of vibe, a tinge of Amy Winehouse and acknowledged influences of Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright. She plays and sings with great expression, and even manages to show her learning, playing awkwardly as a child but with more fluency as she ages. Elephant slides into and out of the songs, which highlight key emotional moments.

If the whole singing, acting and playing the piano ‘thing’ doesn’t work out for her, Lucas could easily have a career as a writer. It’s a 75-minute monologue which always moves into the next part when it needs to and contains a range of interesting characters, her mother being particularly memorable. What’s more, it contains very precise details, more reminiscent of a novel than theatre. The image of the piano being lowered into the room is very striking as is her mother dusting it with ‘a bit of pledge, a bit of cloth’. Later on, there’s another piercingly accurate observation when she goes to a swanky party and realises that everyone at the swanky party has the same (skin-colour) beanie hat.

A show containing one woman, a piano and a stepped bookcase could be a very static affair but Jess Edwards’s direction has Lucas striding, hopping, climbing and lounging. What’s more, Georgia Wilmot’s set spins on a turntable, giving the audience surrounding a range of views. This is especially effective with Laura Howard’s lighting, particularly when Lucas plays on her turntable inside a tent of light.

The story shifts as the play progresses, addressing the issues of identity and colonialism more explicitly with the piano as the central metaphor. Elephant has more nuance than ebony and ivory living together in harmony. The piano itself is a metaphor for a mixed, colonial experience. The mahogany body is from Jamaica, the white keys are from an elephant’s tusk, and yet the object is found in living rooms in middle-class homes all around Europe. An object of beauty that brings a room together through its vibrations, but also a result of violence and theft.

It’s a great show and definitely recommended.

Runs until 4 November 2023