School, the mass media and politicians don’t tell us much about the consequences of Britain invading 90% of the countries in the world. Although those consequences are still with us, the history and the identity of being British are whitewashed to suit those who run the country, even if that doesn’t fit your black, working-class experience.
Lyla, the central character in Anoushka Lucas’s play Elephant, eventually puts it this way to some middle-class people who have very different ideas. She says, “there is so much British Empire in your living room. In you. On me. It’s here with us now.”
The sequence of events in her life that led to that statement is recounted directly to the audience sitting on four sides in an often moving monologue, occasionally interspersed with her singing or playing a piano positioned on a central revolve.
Lyla, of French, English, Indian, and Cameroonian heritage, grew up in a one-bedroom council flat with her sister and parents. She recalls how, at the age of seven, the window of the flat had to be taken off to get a piano into their home. That piano was something she loved and learned to play.
A bursary from France for French citizens paid for her to attend a private school where she was the only non-white student. As a supposed joke, one kid claimed she was brown because she is “covered in years and years of dirt… (having) never taken a bath.”
But Lyla (Anoushka) learned to speak well, attend Oxford, perform as a singer and “appear as a good middle-class person”. Except she often feels out of place. Even the music industry scouts want her to modify what she does.
Meeting and falling in love with the charming, middle-class, blonde-haired drummer Leo brings things to a head when he takes her to see his parents at what he calls a cottage, though it has nine bedrooms and a guest house attached.
The ivory tusks of the elephant used in making the piano keys become a metaphor for the brutal reality of the world. It is told in linked fragments across the performance, opening and closing the show.
The elephant, she explains, is killed to obtain the complete tusk embedded in its skull, and because it is so heavy, in the early days of its plunder would be tasked to four enslaved people tied together to transport it to the ships. The suffering of the animals and the humans is then smartly whitewashed into the beauty and elegance of many objects, such as the piano.
It’s an extraordinary, engaging and gentle performance that has about it a controlled, angry sadness. We know the direction she is travelling. She will make a stand against the whitewashing of history and the encouragement she has been given to contribute to it. We should join her.