"The Elephant Man," [is a] haunting parable about natural man trading his frail beauty and innocence for the protection and prison of society….

Mr. Pomerance has used [the Elephant Man] figure to construct an image of the unspoiled natural man…. John Merrick has an uncomfortably pure sense of the good, an instinctive religious aspiration and a style of thought so unspoiled and direct that he is continually sabotaging the tutored assumptions of his protectors.

The deformity is used not for its own sake but to separate the protagonist from the society he encounters….

His innocence manages to put in question all the assumptions, the order, the power of a society—the Victorian—that considered itself to have abolished once and for all the age-old dichotomy between doing good and doing well. And yet, like Lear's fool, he is helpless and terrified of being dispossessed from the protection that has been given him.

Treves … is a sincere moralist and a sincere success. He is a brilliant doctor and destined for big things. He shows total conviction as he, the Victorian missionary, gradually teaches the Elephant Man to conform to the habits and expectations of society.

But Mr. Pomerance has not given us a prig. Treves is gradually possessed by the magical innocence of his patient, even as the patient becomes attached to the comforts and social advantages of being a scientific celebrity. The doctor begins to realize what is being destroyed. At one point, he tells a colleague that the more "normal" the Elephant Man becomes, the more the illness that will kill him is advancing.

What he is saying by implication, and goes on to say more explicitly at the play's end, is that the free and boundless spirit of his patient has been gradually crushed. The Elephant Man gradually loses the questioning vitality he has at the start. He becomes an internal captive. His energy is channeled, as he sickens, into completing the model of a church. Art, for Mr. Pomerance, is a substitute for the natural grace that we lose in living….

[The second act is] the weaker portion. In part it is inevitable: the opening up of the Elephant Man is more exciting than his decline. And furthermore, many of the themes that are dramatized at the beginning remain to be expounded at the end. They are expounded very well indeed, but some of the play's immediacy flags a bit.

This slowing down is perhaps less a defect than a trait. "The Elephant Man" is an enthralling and luminous play.