Elephant - The Menier Chocolate Factory: A hymn for what was lost, and for what survived.

Anoushka Lucas in Elephant. Image by Manuel Harlan.

⭑ ⭑ ⭑ ⭑ ⭑ - 93% • 5 minutes 19 second read time

Elephant is written by Anoushka Lucas, and it’s her alone that stars in it. Eighty-five minutes straight through, a play with music – all of which she composed herself. The story is semi-autobiographical, names changed but the essence is her. At the centre is Lylah and her piano. And the two of them together take us on a journey through moments in Lylah’s life – back and forth between childhood and adulthood – but also moments that exist in the now, where Lylah isn’t telling us about the before, but rather conversing with us, the people in the room. And she has us hanging on her every word. She has us laughing. She has us holding our breath. She has us wiping away a tear.

I can’t quite explain how much this play touches the very core of me. Not in a way that breaks, but in a way that says: look, here you are. Held. Understood. Connected. A moment tonight – quiet, fleeting, absolute – where I felt so completely grateful to be alive in this exact form, in this exact now, experiencing this. Even though I’ve already seen this play. Even though I knew what was coming. It doesn’t matter. It still split me open in the gentlest way, reached inside, and laid the essence of me bare.

Not with cruelty. Not with shame. But with something sacred. Something that whispered, in seeing me, you are seen. You are connected with this world, and the world that came before this one, and the one still to come. It felt transcendent.

A huge part of the power of Elephant lies in how it’s staged. Director Jess Edwards brings a gentle clarity to the piece – nothing is overplayed, nothing is forced. It’s spacious and precise. The set, designed by Georgia Wilmot, is simple: a sunk revolving stage, a piano, a bookshelf. And yet, it becomes so much more – a flat in Hammersmith, a schoolyard, a music venue in northwest London, a train, a countryside cottage that’s somehow bigger than any cottage has any right to be, a bedroom shared with a lover. Projections spill across the floor, soft and lyrical, holding memory and place. It’s magic in motion – understated, exact, and full of feeling. The entire creative team – all women and AFAB non-binary people – have built something remarkable. It’s art in every way.

There are so many themes and ideas running through this piece it would be rather impossible to unpick them all. But that, perhaps, is the main theme: connection and interconnection. So many threads, so many truths, all of them intertwined. Us to the natural world. History to our present. Generations before to us, to generations still to come. Truth to ignorance. Education to empowerment. Music to our souls. Me to you. All of it deeply and complexly wound together to create our individual experience of the shared thing called life.

Lylah is mixed race – her lineage drawn from Cameroon, France, England, India. Mine: Nigeria, Ireland, India, St Kitts. Watching her was like standing in front of a mirror that doesn’t reflect the surface, but the marrow. The play doesn’t explain what that experience is. It lives it. It shows the discomfort of being the only one in a space of whiteness, and what that power dynamic actually means, even if we don’t want to confront the reality of it. The casual racism, discrimination, and hurt that comes your way as a child, and how you internalise it. How praise is so often wrapped up in how well you assimilate whiteness. Being good and being socially and culturally white almost synonymous. The ways in which the world teaches us to make the rest of us smaller. Our hair, our voices, our self-worth. Small. Malleable.

The ways in which our parents can contribute to it – not because they don’t love us, but because they too were taught. Taught that their difference was dangerous. That survival meant silence. That pride was a risk, and detachment was safety. And so they tried to keep us safe too. Tried to lift us away from what they had been told would hold us back. It isn’t betrayal. It’s heartbreak. It’s inheritance.

The ache of feeling something is missing in you – a root, a knowing, a story – only to realise it was never lost by you, or forgotten by your parents. It was taken. Taken long before you were born, and so it could never be given. And yet it’s still yours to carry. Still being fought for, stitched back together through memory and expression and art.

The isolation that comes from being fetishised for your skin, but when the reality of living in that skin is broached, they don’t want to hear it. They don’t see you – they see a commodity or a conquest. The way in which so many of us seek to be understood through art and expression, but people who do not look like us, live like us, want to push and pull and prod and contort until we are some kind of stereotype of who they think we should be.

Then comes the complexity of confronting how deep the scars run. That your personal trauma is part of a family trauma. That the family trauma is part of a collective trauma. Generational. Geographical. Systemic. A communion of disrespect and resilience. And still, we walk through the world. Expected to smile. To function. To perform. While around us, the markers of our pain remain.

The ships that carried our people now hold up stately homes. Their ribs are beams. Their joints, nailed into privilege. In the cracks of those timbers, pain still lives. The trees they were forced to fell left scars on the land. The mahogany carries memory. Tables. Cabinets. Chairs. Drawers. Wardrobes. Pianos. If beauty is pain, it has never been truer than here – where things of joy, connection, and expression exist only because of violence.

Pianos. The wood, felled by enslaved hands. The keys, ivory from the softest part of an elephant, murdered to meet entitlement. Hoisted on the shoulders of shackled men. This thing that makes Lylah sing – body and soul – wrapped in the legacy of brutality. And yet, this legacy is ignored. Rewritten into a myth of European civility. But ignoring it doesn’t make it so.

The Elephant is the piano, is Lylah, is the people, is me. All of them complexities. All of them a tangled web of all they have ever been, and all which was before. All of them so much more than what they seem. And all of them magnificent in just being.

Elephant doesn’t demand that you think. I mean, a little thinking wouldn’t be amiss, but it doesn’t require the brain be the part of you that watches this most presently. It is the heart. It demands you feel. It is in feeling that we find our most common grounds. To sit in the truth of it. To hold the contradictions. It is a reckoning and a remembering. A hymn for what was lost, and for what survived. A song made from scars, and beauty, and truth.

Go and see it. Let it meet you, right where you are. Let it open something in you you didn’t know was waiting. Let it find the deepest part of you and hold it there, unflinching. Let it remind you that legacy isn’t always what we’re given. Sometimes it’s what we choose to carry forward – in defiance, in reverence, in love.

Elephant is on at the Menier Chocolate Factory in a strictly limited run, ending June 28th. Tickets here.