Race: the elephant in the room
Anoushka Lucas in Elephant: Photo by Henri T.
Daniel Nelson
The elephant in the room in Anoushka Lucas’ one-woman show at the Bush Theatre is, initially, the piano. Gradually it becomes clear that the piano stands for Africa, and the elephant is race..
The piano arrives at the family’s council flat in 1966, and for Lylah, age 7, the world will never again be the same.
She’s the only girl in her class who looks like her, French, part Cameroonian, part Dorset, part Indian. She’s modern languages at Oxford, a pianist and a singer-songwriter.
She talks and plays us, wittily and movingly, through growing up, parents, cousins, school, hair (of course), performing and a frighteningly stomach-churning love affair with a drummer (“Obviously he has an earring”).
Occasionally, small, disturbing comments and thoughts worm their way into this happy world. Like the offstage voices of record label execs trying to push her into their world of stereotypes: urban, authentic, less posh.
The niggling worm, the micro-agressions, the cultural assumptions, reach a crescendo on a visit to her lover’s parents’ nine-bedroom home, where dad waxes nostalgic about his time in colonial Kenya and granny calls her a quadroon.
Her meltdown is one of the finest diatribes against White privilege and White assumptions I’ve ever heard
There’s so much British Empire in your living room,
In you.
It’s here with us now.
And the ivory and hardwood in the piano are at the heart of the prejudices and obfuscations she catalogues.
The performance is barely an hour. It’s (deceptively) simple: basically, a monologue with piano. (Interestingly, the author’s instructions are “original music should be written for any production of this show”.) It’s both delightful and heavily freighted.
* Elephant at the Bush Theatre on 14 October - 4 November 2023. It is billed as an “all-new expanded production” of the October-November 2022 production at the Bush, on which this review was based. Info: 8743 5050/ https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/