Elephant
This review is from October 2022. ‘Elephant’ returns in May 2025.
If Anoushka Lucas had become the British answer to Alicia Keys that various record company types had hoped to sculpt her into, then this autobiographical(ish) solo show would probably be a grandiose two-hour monolith, playing in a huge theatre, packed with familiar hits, special guests and juicy showbiz anecdotes.
But no: although her career as an actor is now really going places – she was terrific in the Young Vic’s Oklahoma! – Lucas’s debut as a playwright is in fact a modest hour, running in the Bush Theatre’s smaller studio space. And it’s all the better for it, in a way, a hushed and thoughtful piece of song-augmented storytelling that exists for the best reason: because she has a good story to tell.
I say ‘she’: in Elephant Lucas plays somebody called Lila. There are bits that are almost certainly not things that literally happened to Lucas. But clearly there are bits that did, and the two women are clearly so similar that I think we can call it a de facto autobiography.
Like Lucas, Lila was born to a mixed-race Cameroonian-French mum and a mixed-race Indian-English dad. Also like Lucas, she had an unusual, bohemian working-class childhood, living in a council flat but scoring a bursary to go to a posh French international school. And also like Lucas, Lila had a piano as a child – which took up a chunk of space in their parents’ living room-slash-bedroom and shaped her destiny.
Physically in the room...