This Broadway transfer is a big, big deal. I cannot recall when a non-musical West End production last splashed out on large-format souvenir programmes (so large-format, in fact, that it wouldn’t fit even into my capacious satchel). What is its hook? The return home of Bernard Pomerance’s play centring on one of the Victorian age’s greatest curiosities? Such a wholesale transfer from New York (as far as I can tell, not even the most minor players have been recast with British actors)? Or could it be the chance to see People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in a state of near-nakedness?

Bradley Cooper (for it is he) is first seen in a functional pair of shorts. Dr Frederick Treves’ mini-lecture on the assorted deformities suffered by John (actually Joseph) Merrick is accompanied, centre stage, by slides of the historical Merrick, and stage right by Cooper gradually assuming the facial and bodily contortions in which he will play the role. He is accomplished at reconfiguring his body and assuming the surprisingly fluting voice with which Merrick is recorded as having spoken (prior to this production, which premièred in Williamstown in 2012, Cooper had played Merrick in graduate school).

Yet although Merrick is both the title and the headline role, the play’s true focus is Treves. In showing how Merrick served as a mirror for the attitudes of those around him, from hospital staff to the aristocracy who adopted him as a cause, Pomerance makes a discreet (and, it must be said, not terribly telling) indictment of the hollowness of Victorian patronage. Alessandro Nivola’s role as Treves is to enact the gradual realisation of this sham, which he does with fine judgement, showing Treves’ frustration that the more he does for Merrick by way of social circumstance, the less he can arrest the degenerative physical condition.

Similarly, Scott Ellis’s production is deliberately similarly blank in appearance: a largely empty stage, unspecifically Victorian décor, and liberal use of “wipe” curtains crossing the stage. Amongst those finding their self-image reflected in Merrick are Bishop Walsham How and the exploitative showman Ross, both played by Anthony Heald, and celebrated actress Mrs Kendal, who in Patricia Clarkson’s portrayal somewhat recalls Bebe Neuwirth. But the play itself is a flimsy thing. Subject and star combine to make an impressive hook, but there’s precious little to hang on it.
  
Written for the Financial Times.