Elephant at Menier Chocolate Factory – review

There’s something about a piano. As Anoushka Lucas says at the beginning of this mesmeric, challenging monologue, when you hit a note, it makes the air vibrate. “We’re all vibrating together,” she says. You have to listen.

Elephant, written, composed and performed by Lucas and developed and directed by Jess Edwards, was first seen at the Bush in 2022. Semi-autobiographical, it began as a short piece commissioned in 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd.

Five years on, it has lost none of its power to entertain, trouble and provoke as it examines the ways in which mixed-race Londoner Lylah discovers “how quickly you learn what you are not allowed to speak out loud, no matter how many languages you speak” as she navigates the complexities of race, class and gender. Indeed, if anything, a newly refocused production lends her words even more urgency and impact.

The great gift of the play is the directness and the beauty of its central image. Lylah’s life is changed at the age of seven by the arrival of a piano “swinging like some kind of pirate ship” into her council flat in west London. The windows have been removed to allow the instrument in: they let in light and possibility, but also an understanding of how a piano, made of mahogany and ivory, embodies the legacy of colonialism and empire.

In Georgia Wilmot’s design, the piano sits in the middle of a circle, revolving as Lucas plays. Gillian Tan’s videos scrawl the dates of three key periods of Lylah’s life across the floor: her schooldays at a posh lycée, which she attends on a scholarship; her relationship with a middle-class drummer lover; her meetings with record company executives to discuss her first album deal. Laura Howard’s lighting and Xana’s sound design respond to the songs Lucas plays – and the words she speaks – helping her to weave an entrancing spell, slipping between warmth and darkness, despair and hope, amusement and pure, unmitigated anger.

Lucas is a magnetic storyteller as she roams around the narrative, instantly conjuring the bright schoolgirl anxious to play by the rules but increasingly conscious of the fact that her family lives in two rooms where others have parlours and the aspirant singer-songwriter constantly crushed by the expectations of record company executives who want her to be more urban. “Apparently, I make music wrong,” she says, with droll despair.

She creates vivid characters too – her Jamaican uncle, her hectoring but loving mother, her laid-back boyfriend with his easy assumptions and his colonial family. Her songs, the notes on the piano, the harmonies and discords, bind everything together as she animates the entire space, sending thoughts and feelings flying into the air. The piano is the heart of everything: she climbs on it, hides under it.

It provides the ground and anchor for a genuinely original play, one that grapples with the complexities of embedded histories and assumptions, and fights to let its heroine be heard in all her unique authority. You have to listen.