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Despite his labored breathing, he often sounds the way children look when they release balloons: wistful and thrilled, as if no one in the history of the world had ever felt such longing and elation. Onstage, Cooper’s Merrick shows the legacy of his mother’s optimism in his voice at times, he’s a joyful mama’s boy. In David Lynch’s masterly, heartbreaking 1980 film version of Merrick’s story, he periodically gazes at a photograph of his late mother. (Defensiveness is not a disease that affects him.) You can tell that he remembers the power of that feeling from having had a mother who saw him, her son, and not his difference. Part of what makes Merrick such a fantastic and humane character is the fact that, despite enormous obstacles, he never turns away from love or its possibility.
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What he isn’t used to, at first, is being asked how he feels, or the warm room and clean bed that Treves provides when Merrick is brought to him (after a series of calamities, including his abandonment by Ross during a tour in Brussels). Merrick is used to being stared at, prodded, questioned, unloved.
Treves approaches Ross and Merrick politely, of course, but his excitement grows as he realizes that-when it comes to deformities that he can study forever without necessarily curing them-professionally he’s scored. Merrick, meanwhile, sits behind a curtain in a cape and a huge hat and veil.
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To live with his physical hideousness, incapacitating deformities, and unremitting pain is trial enough, but to be exposed to the cruelly lacerating expressions of horror and disgust by all who behold him-is even more difficult to bear.
Tuppence only, step in and see: This side of the grave, John Merrick has no hope nor expectation of relief. . . . Merrick is managed by a man named Ross (Anthony Heald, playing the part perhaps too much like a grownup Artful Dodger), who barks his star attraction’s deformities from a penny gaff across the street from London Hospital: Treves wastes no time finding an unfortunate: Merrick (Bradley Cooper, who does a bang-up job physically and aurally).
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How to achieve that, though, in this new environment? Plus, hasn’t he left something crucial off his list, especially in view of his presumably healing vocation? What about heart? That is something he’ll have to discover in the course of this metaphysical detective tale. In an English age, an Englishman.” But these are only words attached to ideas of convention and acceptance: he wants to be exceptional, which is to say, like everyone else. After Gomm exits, Treves tells us who he believes he is: “A happy childhood in Dorset.
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In order to “satisfy,” Treves must find a cruel narrative that will yield a study, while underscoring his upper-class professional tolerance. Add to our reputation by going further, and that’ll satisfy. The Empire provides unparalleled opportunities for our studies, as places cruel to life are the most revealing scientifically. Ignore the squalor of Whitechapel, the general dinginess, neglect and poverty without, and you will find a continual medical riches in the London Hospital. . . . I like to see merit credited, and your industry, accomplishment, and skill all do you credit. Books on Scrofula and Applied Surgical Anatomy-I’m happy to see you rising, Mr.
After years as a touring exhibit, he eventually became a living case study at London Hospital, in Whitechapel, where he found refuge, until his death, in 1890.Īge thirty-one. Merrick’s mother died when he was young, and, rejected by his father and his stepmother, Joseph ended up in a workhouse, where he lived for four years before contacting a showman, looking for rescue. Merrick’s body began its amazing transformation early on: his head was covered in growths, and his right arm was a useless club. “The Elephant Man” is based on the true story of Joseph Merrick-in Pomerance’s script, he’s called John Merrick-and takes place some twenty years after his birth, in Leicester, in 1862. (Suzan-Lori Parks’s impressionistic beauty of a play, “Venus”-about Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman, the African woman with a prominent derrière, who was billed as “the Hottentot Venus” on the grim nineteenth-century English freak-show circuit-is one of them.) Plays like these would be chosen not so much to instruct audiences in outsiderness, per se, as to show how marginalization is handled, or not handled, on the American stage, and how much the subject can reveal about a playwright’s interest in failure, including his or her own. In the repertory company of my mind, Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play, “The Elephant Man” (now in its first Broadway revival since 2002, at the Booth), would rotate with a number of other dramas about human “freaks,” who were further misshapen by fame and empire.
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