Writer: Anoushka Lucas
Director: Jess Edwards
Lylah’s life is the elephant in the room, although it takes her a long time to realise it. The revival of Anouska Lucas’ one-woman show Elephant, co-developed with Jess Edwards, transfers from the Bush Theatre, where it played in 2022, to the Menier Chocolate Factory. Built around a description of the substance, construction and operation of a piano, this 85-minute biographical story about fitting in, understanding the interconnectivity of all lives and being “weird” uses storytelling and music to address subverted identities across a young musician’s life.
Working-class student Lylah attends a fee-paying school thanks to a bursary from the French government reliant on her dual citizenship. Meanwhile, at home, her parents decide to buy their council flat as Lylah looks on in awe at the lifestyle of her Cameroonian cousins, while she must conform to her mother’s expectations. Years later, Lylah meets drummer Leo, but the shine comes off their relationship during a family visit that leaves her feeling more isolated than ever.
Lucas’s show packs a number of themes into its relatively short running time, cutting between several different sections of Lylah’s life from the 1990s and 2018. Primarily, it is her love of music that shines through with a number of original songs underpinning core storytelling moments, while the shape of the narrative physically unfolds around the central upright piano, which becomes the backbone of Elephant. Every aspect of Lylah’s first-hand tale is drawn back to music from a memory of a piano being winched through the windows of her childhood council flat, to lessons and shared experiences with school friends, and eventually performing on stage as a songwriter in a relationship built around their shared love of creating music.
But as Elephant unfolds, throw away references start to accumulate, the uncomfortable relationship with her Black British and French heritage that Lylah cannot fully articulate, the use of ivory to make piano keys and its economic interaction with slavery transporting it round the world and, eventually, the dismissive and casually racist conversations taking place with Leo and his family. This is only expanded by the inclusion of directive notes from auditions from industry professionals trying to reshape her music style, played as disembodied voices that push Lylah away from her own creative instincts to something more “marketable.”
In Elephant, Lucas identifies and slowly introduces this notion of imposed white middle-class identities that she has been expected to adopt while still being reminded of her difference. The elephant in the room eventually explodes in a tirade that, perhaps overcooked, draws together these different strands. The result forces the dramatic conclusion the story needs but the point that “nothing is on its own” puts Lylah’s quest for self-understanding in the context of the single elephant tusk making masses of piano keys on unknowingly connected instruments around the world – a thought that, in fully acknowledging the suffering of the creature, brings her some comfort about her own place in it all.
As writer, composer and performer, Lucas has a warm but powerful presence, weaving text and songs to draw the audience into Lylah’s story and unfold its themes. As her distinctive and intimate vocal envelopes the small Menier auditorium, Lylah describes playing the piano as like having a whole room to herself, and Lucas certainly has this one.
Runs until 29 June 2025
