Entrances don’t get much bigger. First there are four circus barkers, all scarlet jackets and hyperbole. Then the curtain draws back to reveal a storm of dry ice and an electric guitarist grinding out power chords. A container revolves, the door pulls back, more dry ice. Only then do we see Joseph Merrick.
Joseph, you will note, not John. That name was just one misrepresentation of many in the life of the Leicester-born man whose abnormal bone growth turned him into a 19th-century freakshow attraction and medical curiosity. He could never be himself, only a projection of the world’s hang-ups.
But after the grand entrance, what next? Tom Wright’s play, first seen in 2017 at Melbourne’s Malthouse and now given a handsome production by director Stephen Bailey, is caught between two stools. On the one hand, it has to tell the story of the workhouse boy who, in desperation, made his sideshow debut in Nottingham before joining the circus and ending his days – for want of anywhere better – in a hospital. On the other hand, even while it trades on our own voyeuristic impulse to know more, the play wants to make a wider social point about conformity and exclusion.
This, says the young Joseph’s father, is “the age of sameness”, an industrial society pumping out homogeneous commodities and expecting uniform consumers in return. It is an attitude implicitly challenged by Bailey’s production with its defiant and assertive D/deaf, disabled and/or neurodivergent cast. “If you reject Merrick,” they seem to say, “you must also reject us.”
But it is also an easy argument for Wright to propose. Who would make the case against inclusiveness and understanding? Would anyone claim Merrick deserved all he got? We are on his side before the show has even started.
If that lessens the dramatic tension, actor Zak Ford-Williams makes it easy for us to empathise. In the lead role, he radiates sweet nature without being ingratiating, and yet argues with a righteous fury at the hypocrisy of those who seem to care for him. It is a performance at once heartening and sad, and a production, on Simon Kenny’s fluid set dynamically lit by Jai Morjaria, with vigour and attitude.
At Nottingham Playhouse until 7 October. Touring until 28 October.
