one4review | On 03, Aug 2023

Sam is a young person who’s been left home alone and while his mum is out, the TV is on, that is until there’s a knock at the door! You may have heard this one before, and if you’ve ever read children’s stories at bedtime, you could start rolling through the possibilities. A cat in a hat? A hungry tiger? A small bear from Peru? None of the above; this time, it’s ‘A slightly annoying elephant’ who, I’d say, is a bit more than slightly annoying.

Before anything else, I’d like to commend the talent on stage, given quite a challenging script to work with, and some rather odd direction choices, they did their best with what they had, in my opinion.

What plays out is not so much a children’s story as an echo back to a time where some older male figures of authority were the figure of authority simply because they were older and male. The constant “silly boy” became extremely draining, and this is the start of what is a rather problematic script. I felt like I wasn’t so much watching a children’s musical as much as I was watching a poor young person having to endure an elderly male figure; the fact it’s an elephant seems almost redundant when you look at the pain our lead has to suffer at the hands of his unwanted guest.

Whether he is forcing the child to cook, pick up after him, hand over their prized possession (then destroy it), the elephant isn’t ‘slightly annoying’, he’s toxic and I’m sorry to spoil anything here but that’s it. There’s no surprise twist on how our young lead escapes or the Elephant learns the error of his ways as we’ve become quite used to in modern children’s literature. This is simply how the story ends, with the child trapped in this toxic environment with no hope of escape. I left feeling quite sad for the child and the children watching, as I’m not sure what the message was except for “sometimes life is hard and people are awful; endure it anyway”. I spoke to my children about the negative implications of this and one of them said they were disappointed it wasn’t a real elephant and the other pointed out that elephants don’t speak through their noses as this elephant seemed to do quite a bit. Scathing.

2**

Reviewed by Matthew
Gilded Balloon – Debating Hall
13.00 (45 mins)
Until 28 August (not 14 or 21)