Thirty years have passed since Bernard Pomerance's dramatic portrait of Victorian "freak of nature" John Merrick debuted on the London stage. David Bowie famously played the part on Broadway in 1980; in the same year, John Hurt endured countless hours in makeup and delivered a heartbreaking performance in David Lynch's spellbinding film.
Bruce Guthrie's revival, seen last month at the New Wimbledon Studio and now running at the Trafalgar Studios, has failed to convince critics. First, the good news: Marc Pickering's Merrick has been almost universally praised. The Guardian's Lyn Gardner applauded his "powerful, dignified performance" and The Stage's Mark Shenton was also impressed by the actor's "selflessness and dignity" in the role. Sam Marlowe at The Times thought Pickering "riveting" and was impressed by his combination of "childlike innocence and emotional fragility with an entirely adult intellectual sophistication". However, the Evening Standard's Kieron Quirke was distinctly nonplussed: "he imbues his mangled speech with none of the soul we hear so much about, slipping into a monotonous melancholy from which the play takes its pace."
Ah yes, the play itself. Here comes the bad news: Lyn Gardner feels that the years haven't been kind to Pomerance, and that his drama is "now looking creaky and old-fashioned". The Times bemoaned Natalie Powell's clumsy design; the Evening Standard diagnosed the flaw as over-ambition. Time Out's Robert Shore deemed the production "efficient if slightly underwhelming"; Kieron Quirke was less kind, dishing out some damning elephant-inspired dismissals: "A jumbo failure ... Stampede to avoid it."
Critics also managed to find some surprising points of comparison for the play. Sam Marlowe likened its study of the doctor-patient relationship, and the tensions between art and science, to Equus; Mark Shenton pitched the production as My Fair Lady-meets-Phantom of the Opera; and Robert Shore, after detecting a whiff of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, even managed to find shades of Austin Powers' Dr Evil in Pickering's performance.
