Writer: Peter Hamilton
Director: Ken McClymont
The Elephant in the Room is an excellent two-series sitcom and a mildly disappointing Play for Today chucked into what Mr Krish (Yasser Kayani) would call a ‘cocktail blender’ and then presented to an audience for two hours. An incredibly mixed bag, a talented cast and strong direction lift a patchy script into an entertaining but puzzling show.
Ashley Davenport (Fraser Anthony) has been on a gap year to India: there, in circumstances not entirely explained or as integral to the plot as the summary on the Tabard’s website might suggest, he has encountered Yama, King of Death, and thus resolved to give up his worldly goods and retire to Gethsemane Garden Village Retirement Home. Here he rubs up, figuratively and literally, against the residents and staff, in what feels like an amusing update of 90s sitcom Waiting for God mixed with commentary on death, ageing, religion, entitled middle-class children, socialism, refugees, pastry and suicide. It’s a tidal wave of a sentence, much less a piece of drama, and the play contains so many themes and styles one hardly knows where to look.
The literal Elephant in the Room is the fact that this is four strong plays mixed together with diminishing results, as comedy uncomfortably mixes with tragedy and as the show lurches from one style to another, a key suicide or religious crescendo coming out of the blue. There is a tight 90-minute drama or comedy within Hamilton’s text: it’s a shame it hasn’t been found yet.
What Hamilton does excel at is drawing the majority of his characters with the eye of a Clement, Le Frenais or Jimmy Perry: Rosemary (Josie Ayers), Johnny (Craig Crosbie), Judith (Kristin Milward) and David (Stephen Omer) are cleverly realized retirees, each being given strong and humorous personalities and with Omer, in particular, the best lines, matched by excellent comic timing. Other characters are less strong but Anthony and Kayani do the best with their material; Anthony an excellent, entitled middle-class twit and Kayani doing a fine turn in comedy alcoholism. Unfortunately, Miguel (Baptiste Semin) and Kim-Ly (Kee Jia-Yu) are less well defined despite Hamilton’s seeming intention to foreground their experiences as “illegal” immigrants, and bear the brunt of the uneven mix between comedy, tragedy and social commentary: but the actors do a good job with what they’re given.
Hamilton is a clearly talented comic writer who feels he has to give commentary on the issues of the day: he doesn’t. The best of this play is in the interaction between characters, drawn deftly and hilariously; it’s when he strays into heavy-handed or confusing social commentary that the text suffers, or at times makes no sense at all (just what does the elephant represent?). Regardless, The Elephant in the Room is a frequently funny, joke-laden piece about the contrast between youth and age, feelings of regret, and the boredom of the retiree. Unfortunately, it also tries to be 17 other things as well.
Runs until 2 December 2023
