Michael Morpurgo’s 2010 story presents a tale of the past that speaks movingly to our own present day. A family of refugees, their city destroyed, sets out in search of safety. The time is 1945, the city Dresden. Simon Reade’s stage adaptation, performed by Alison Reid and first seen in 2014, retains the core of the narrative but gives it a new framing. Book and play both centre on a teenage girl called Lizzie. In the book, Lizzie is an old woman in a home, recounting her experience of trekking across Germany to a nurse and her son. In the play, her memories of days in hiding and nights spent walking with her mother, an enemy airman and an elephant, are triggered by a 1989 radio announcement that the Berlin Wall has fallen. While this change is clearly practical – helping to reduce the number of characters, including Lizzie’s younger brother – it also provides dramatic and emotional impact: the action starts and ends with a powerful, real-world affirmation that positive change is possible.
The form of the production is itself a further affirmation of our potential for transformation. We see before us one woman, three sections of a broken wall, a couple of boxes (Max Johns’s set) and coloured lights and shadows (Matthew Graham’s lighting); we hear, through speakers, music, voices, singing, the roaring of fire, the drone of planes, the whine of bombs (sound design, Jason Barnes). Animated through Reid’s performance, these various elements evoke to our imaginations a home in Dresden, its destruction, a trek along frozen roads, a hay-filled barn, confrontations with soldiers, a 20-strong boy choir – and, of course, a four-year-old elephant called Marlene (after Dietrich), rescued from Dresden’s zoo by Lizzie’s mother. Where Reid’s transitions from one character to another seem, sometimes, blurred at the edges, her evocation through movement of Marlene’s walk and waving ears is uncanny: I swear I saw an elephant on the stage.
An Elephant in the Garden is at the Barn theatre, Cirencester, until 11 September
