[The Elephant Man] is about charity and caring and the motives of those who are supposedly doing good works and indeed this is an important dramatic subject. But it seems to me that The Elephant Man badly misfires for two reasons. Commonsense and Jung tell us that all good drama is only another re-working of a universally held truth. But in this play Mr. Pomerance has stacked the cards against himself by focusing his play on a character/symbol, a total physical freak, which fortunately has always been a rarity. His leading character is John Merrick, 'The Elephant Man', who was born in the middle of Victoria's reign, grew to manhood in hideous deformity and died at an early age in a London hospital in 1890.

The other great fault of the play is the author's misanthropic view of mankind. He seems to believe that no-one gives charity for altruistic reasons. Every one of his characters (with the possible exception of Mrs. Kendal, the actress) is finally shown as motivated by pure selfishness…. I assume that Mr. Pomerance is not merely telling us that the Victorians were a materialistic and hypocritical society. After all many writers from Dickens through Samuel Butler to the last whimpers of Lytton Strachey have all told us that. Thus we must assume that the sad story of John Merrick is intended to be relevant now. But it is really impossible to make this leap. Pomerance locks us in a Victorian social framework with characters motivated by Victorian mores, while at the same time asking us to accept this as a microcosm of contemporary society….

[There] is certainly an important play to be written about caring for the unfortunate of the earth. But let the play be set now, instead of coyly sniping at our dubious motives from behind a Victorian barricade. Thus while I refuse to accept Mr. Pomerance's bleak view of humanity I might be more convinced if he were to come out into the open and write about a society of which we all have first hand knowledge. (p. 72)