Actually, I failed completely to see it coming. Sigh … I love street theatre and I'd have loved this (London, last weekend) — as covered in today's Observer:
This fantastic spectacle, by the French company, Royal de Luxe, was covered by Lyn Gardner over a week ago in the Guardian:
By rights it shouldn't work because, at first sight, it really isn't very much if you think a vast mechanical elephant the size of a three-storey building trundling around the streets of central London and bringing the traffic to a standstill isn't very much. The elephant is a time-travelling beast that belongs to the sultan who - accompanied by his exotic retinue - has come to our world in search of a little girl. The little girl is a puppet the size of a house. She walks, she bats her eyelashes, she pisses in the street. About the only thing she doesn't do is talk. The elephant makes up for this reticence by trumpeting so noisily that on Friday afternoon sunbathers in St James' Park, oblivious to what was going on, enquired whether there might be a circus in town.
And that, folks, is about it. What narrative there is really doesn't matter a jot. But this is much more than some grand carnival-esque procession, although it has elements of carnival. This is about the giddy pleasure of interaction as girl and elephant communicate with each other and the audience, and the audience communicates with each other. What the Sultan's Elephant represents is nothing less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people.
And in today's Observer, Susannah Clapp:
It was the sightings that counted: the massive tusks jutting out round the corner of Trafalgar Square; the animal sinking to his knees for a snooze in front of the Wolseley; the close-up view of his amiable wrinkled face; and the Lilliputian crew - in frockcoats and knickerbockers - who hung on cables and pulled on levers.
Flickr comes up trumps again: Royal de Luxe, Sultan's Elephant (both links are for Flickr's 'most interesting').
Technorati tags: street theatre, Royal de Luxe, Sultan's Elephant
