THE SULTAN’S ELEPHANT AND THE HEART OF THE STATE
After lunch on Sunday May 7 2006, I — and hundreds of thousands of other people — inched along Piccadilly in glorious sunshine, gazing up at the Sultan’s Elephant’s massive backside.
Along the way, one of Bob Newhart’s comedy phone calls came to mind: the one where Sir Walter Raleigh’s sceptical backer tries to understand why he has a boat full of 80 tons of leaves.
“So, Walt, you dry out the leaves, and then? You roll them up into a kind of cylinder, Great, and then? Oh you put one end of it .. in your mouth.. I see..and then? You set fire to it!!(Chortles delightedly) I love your sense of humour, Walt, but what about that El Dorado place we talked about?” etc etc
Well, I imagined that many months before, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, or someone equally busy and mportant must have taken a Bob Newhart-type call from Helen Marriage of Artichoke Productions.
“Hi .. yes, it is. Hi Helen, And you’re from who? .. Artichoke Productions. (Chuckles) Lovely French accent by the way. So, .. yes.. OK and … and the idea is?? …to build a giant mobile mechanical elephant…. the size of a three storey building.. ahha..(PAUSE) Silly question, I know, but why mobile? Ahha. So that it can walk from Horse Guards Parade, down the Mall, up to Hyde Park Corner down to Piccadilly Circus, and back via the Haymarket and Pall Mall. Hmmm. In the middle of the night? Oh, in the middle of the day.. I see, of course, you intend to attract crowds of people. Just the once? Say again, Helen, I dropped the phone.. For three days in a row in May 2006.. I see. Well, Helen, normally there’s quite a lot of traffic around those streets…even on a Sunday… Ahha. You want all those streets closed off…for several hours in the middle of the day on Friday and Saturday as well….Who is this, really? Is this “Dead Ringers” Is this someone on Radio 4 up to your old tricks again? “
But it did happen. There I was in the middle of this enormous throng of happy people on a sunny Sunday afternoon, following the Sultan’s Elephant as it waggled its ears and sprayed delighted spectators with water from its very long trunk, and trudged along at a mile an hour.
The elephant was only part of the project . There was also the 20 foot high “Little Girl”, the astronaut, who’s rocket ship had appeared at the bottom of the Haymarket on Thursday. There were the musicians who accompanied the elephant’s perambulations with a sort-of slowed down electronic version of Ravel’s “Bolero”. There were the Sultan and his concubines who rode atop the elephant, and the astrologers who took sightings from the balconies built into its massive flanks and so much more besides.
And the traffic was stopped. And everyone agreed that it was more than a million pounds well spent. The sense of wonder and delight was palpable whenever the elephant came into view or doused its followers with water, or sank to its knees to rest in the sand of Horse Guards Parade, or communed nose-to-trunk with the Little Girl as they bade each other and all of us a curiously touching farewell at 6pm on Sunday. Many of us were in tears, as the wonders came to an end and the Little Girl re-entered the rocket.
It had all come to pass, and all credit must go to the Helen and her colleagues at Artichoke productions, Royal de Luxe, a French street theatre company who `staged’ the whole extravaganza. To the Metropolitan Police and every kind of public service responsible for keeping London in good shape. To the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone and the Arts Council for providing the core funding, to pull the whole thing together.
So, you see a big share of the credit must also go to that amorphous entity ‘the State’. The artists need the State to provide the bureaucrats and the tax-payers’ money that can make their vision a reality. The (French) state together with the French cities had funded Royal de Luxe to create the original outings of the Sultan’s Elephant and the Little Girl. And then it was only through the planning, coordinating and supportive role of thousands of public servants. i.e. ‘the British State’, that such a hugely complex, mind-blowing and beautiful event was possible in London.
As we all bade farewell to the Sultan’s Elephant on that Sunday evening I heard a father saying to his little boy, “Because you’ll probably never see anything like that again in your life-time: that’s why we came.”
We can only hope that somewhere, someone is picking up the phone and making their pitch for yet another mind-blowing extravaganza, one that will lift millions of hearts for a lifetime.
And, while we’re,let’s give a hearty cheer for the state, and its constant concern to make all of our lives not only safer and more secure, but, when given the chance, more satisfying and beautiful and memorable.
Roy Madron
