It is unfortunate for the elephant that its ivory tusks have been popular with humans for centuries. Visit any museum and you are likely to find elaborately crafted ornaments made from this material. As a result of the popularity, the elephant population has been decimated to such an extent that some conservationists talk about the possibility of human activity causing the elephant to become extinct, and this is despite a ban on the international trade in ivory.
In sixteen short scenes, Lynn Nottage lets us glimpse the illegal network that encourages the killing to continue. It centres on the elephant Mlma (Ira Mandela Siobhan), “one of the last big tuskers in Kenya”.
Mlma opens the show aware of an approaching danger. He describes how he has learned from his family to “listen with his whole body” to what is happening around him. This is just one of the positive things about his family he recalls as he tries to avoid approaching hunters.
Although Mjima is killed in the first few scenes, he is present throughout the play, his body physically moving slowly in response to the conversations he hears, his hands smearing a white paint-like stain on all those who are complicit in the transportation of his tusks.
It turns out the poachers led by Geedi (Natey Jones) were on an illegal business assignment from the local police chief Githinji (Gabrielle Brooks), who is not happy they chose a very rare elephant that will draw too much attention to their crime.
The extent of that fuss becomes evident when regional wildlife warden Wanwara is in a meeting with Andrew Graves (Brandon Grace), the white Kenyan wildlife director who tells him about the negative media publicity and the pressure to find the culprits and the tusks
Bribes and a slightly malfunctioning network of corruption that includes Goux, a Chinese embassy official (Pui Fan Lee), allow the tusks to illegally find their way, via Vietnam, to the rather wealthy household of Alice (Brandon Grace) and her partner as a wonderfully sculpted display for visitors. It is not hidden in their home and its owners feel no risk of the law. They are rich.
The play’s sequence of events and the twenty thinly but sufficiently sketched characters ably performed by five actors directed by Miranda Cromwell are a convincing and believable account of a trade that continues to devastate the remaining elephant population of the world.