{"id":11659,"date":"2021-04-02T19:51:55","date_gmt":"2021-04-02T19:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laughfrodisiac.com\/?p=11659"},"modified":"2021-04-02T19:51:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-02T19:51:58","slug":"new-weekend-theatre-an-elephant-in-the-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laughfrodisiac.com\/2021\/04\/02\/new-weekend-theatre-an-elephant-in-the-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"New weekend theatre: An Elephant in the Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Today&#8217;s show is &#8216;An Elephant in the Garden&#8217; presented by the Barn Theatre in association with Exeter Northcott Theatre. It streams from tonight until the 18th.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I found it kind of hilarious that I got the press night info for &#8216;An Elephant in the Garden&#8217; on the same day as I discovered dozens upon dozens of Nazi apologists in a seemingly benign Reddit post. What a day for sympathizing with Germans during World War II! Of course regular German citizens were victims of their government and suffered terribly, but what fun timing. &#8216;An Elephant in the Garden&#8217; is the stage version of Michael Mortugo&#8217;s book inspired by stories of zookeepers during the war, who tried to save animals destined for death in the event of bombings (they couldn&#8217;t have animals roaming the streets if their enclosures and caretakers were harmed &#8211; animals moving about freely, perish the thought). In this tale, teenage Lizzie and her mother flee on foot from Dresden after it&#8217;s destroyed, and they take Marlene, a baby elephant, with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Alison Reid in this two-hander (she has two hands) does a good job of keeping her energy up and keeping the story alive. Some cringey lines had us doing Chrissy Teigen&#8217;s Golden Globes face, but altogether it&#8217;s decent. The tone felt 60% for adults and 40% clearly for kids, so it&#8217;s a bit uneven. Reid&#8217;s handling of the handful of characters is nicely done. Yet the story as a whole felt a little unearned. Like the only thing I could say in response was &#8220;okay, and&#8230;&#8221; It feels like so much modern theatre and other art is focusing on Germans during the war in a purposeful attempt to not do more &#8216;obvious victim&#8217; stories, but often without good reasons, trying to rely on the whole &#8216;we don&#8217;t think enough about <em>these<\/em> victims!&#8217; idea but without sufficient justification for it being a play in the first place. Why am I supposed to care about this person, this family? I care about the elephant, for sure, but the reviews talking about how the elephant becomes the hero of the story, the main focus, are full of crap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This play exists in a weird political limbo, alluding to bad German behavior but nothing tooo bad, never sharing any real political views and then all of a sudden calling Hitler an enemy towards the end just to make sure they made that clear in a CYA move that felt super obvious. There&#8217;s a bit with a horribly racist aunt and uncle, but their evilness is still kind of kid-friendly, as is the narrator&#8217;s happy obliviousness at the end, where she says &#8216;I like to believe my aunt and uncle changed for the good&#8217; after the war. What, by staying silent about their bigotry? I do not like the implied message of this part. I feeeeel liiiiiike you should need to do more to prove goodness, especially if you wanted this war and loved ya boy Adolf. Do not like the message this sends to audiences, kids and the veryyyy problematic general British adult public alike. So, although this was fine, I&#8217;m a little peeved about its purpose in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Regardless of how much I would like a second, stronger draft that answers my questions, you have to hand it to the Barn Theatre for their content this year. They&#8217;ve been putting out so much theatre for home viewing, seemingly nonstop, and that is something to be commended. Also &#8211; they seem to acknowledge and respect that our attention spans are absolutely shot. The vast majority of their content has been around an hour &#8211; perfect for the home viewer who struggles to spend even thirty minutes watching something without simultaneously scrolling on their phone. I&#8217;m sure I could handle a longer thing &#8211; I have been watching serious movies and mostly concentrating, but it&#8217;s still a mental hurdle to even begin watching something when you know you have to concentrate for a long time. (It probably goes without saying that I am very very behind on work.) Anyway, thanks to the Barn, even though I didn&#8217;t love this one (but again, that could be in part because of all the Nazi sympathizers running rampant nowadays! Don&#8217;t let them get away with it!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Photo credit: Farrows Creative<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s show is &#8216;An Elephant in the Garden&#8217; presented by the Barn Theatre in association with Exeter Northcott Theatre. It streams from tonight until the 18th. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>New weekend theatre: An Elephant in the Garden - Laughfrodisiac<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/laughfrodisiac.com\/2021\/04\/02\/new-weekend-theatre-an-elephant-in-the-garden\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New weekend theatre: An Elephant in the Garden - Laughfrodisiac\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today&#8217;s show is &#8216;An Elephant in the Garden&#8217; presented by the Barn Theatre in association with Exeter Northcott Theatre. 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