The Vanishing Elephant reunites a tried-and-tested creative team to produce another winner for Cahoots NI with a show whose charm and spectacle clothe a moving morality tale about the exploitation of people and animals.
Returning from a well-received run in New York’s Off-Broadway to play on the main stage of the Grand Opera House—a key offering for family audiences in the Belfast International Arts Festival—it’s a sad, sweet-sour story captivatingly told.
There’s something Dickensian about its mirroring of two orphans—a young Indian elephant, Janu, and Opu, the boy who befriends her—who become friends, forced to separate and their eventual reunion. And about the implicit meaning in how both are exploited, Janu taken to foreign lands and turned into a performing novelty, Opu treated as an experiment in enhancing the status of his adoptive parents.
Younger audience members will alight on Janu’s sorry biography: taken from her home in Bengal and transported halfway across the world to become a performer of tricks for New Yorkers eager for exotic entertainment.
The adults accompanying them may well recognise in it a critique (albeit delivered with the lightest of touches) of colonial aggrandisement and capitalism’s reflex and ruthless commodification of even living creatures.
Both perspectives are treated with the engaging theatricality that has become Cahoots’ signature. Central to The Vanishing Elephant’s success are the life-sized puppets that increase in size as Janu grows into adulthood, stalked by a fierce, slinky Bengal tiger that prowls the stage in search of prey. All are vividly realised, the changes in Janu’s personality particularly affecting as the lives she has led vanish only to be replaced by something worse and more demeaning.
A final, if wishful, release is implied when she is the centrepiece of a famed illusion by Harry Houdini in which the renamed Jenny was disappeared before a confounded audience—an effect deftly executed here.
Charles Way’s sensitively written script and Helen Foan’s characterful, skilfully articulated puppets make an indelible impression—both contributing to last year’s When We Were Wild. Despite some longueurs in the first half, Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney directs with a fluidity of touch that stays on the right side of sentimentality to marshal his internationally-sourced cast into a persuasive ensemble.
Pallavi MD and Aoife Kavanagh’s score inks in due atmosphere and emotion, as poignant as it is joyful in its use of idioms from Indian dance, authentically choreographed by Jayachandran Palazhy, and lit up by Philippa O’Hara’s live vocals.
For all The Vanishing Elephant’s pageant and colour, what one takes away is the plaintive complaint underpinning it, one that readily chimes in a world buckling by the day under corrosive exploitation.
Those who want to revisit the experience will want to know that Cahoots has published a book, written by Way and illustrated by set and costume designer Sabine Dargent, relating the adventures of Janu.