The freakshow is back in town. It’s striking that Bernard Pomerance’s flawed 1977 drama about the life of Joseph (John) Merrick should have received two revivals within a year, the first at the West End’s Trafalgar Studios, the second this touring Sheffield Theatres production.

The play is a schematic, slightly stilted affair; what seems to endure is the fascination of its title character and the duality of his horrifying deformities and beautiful soul. So familiar is the noble Merrick figure that he has become something of a sentimentalised cliché. Ellie Jones’s staging is lumbered with that difficulty, and with the shortcomings of the writing, but she makes fluid and at times affecting work of the play.

Ellen Cairns’s design is a dilapidated Victorian bandstand, its pale, fractured curlicues like fragments of tortured bone. It’s an elegantly economical setting for Pomerance’s account of Merrick’s story, which begins in a touring sideshow and ends in the room at the London Hospital where he died, aged just 28. Here the fast-rising surgeon Frederick Treves rescues Merrick from a life of professional humiliation, only to turn him first into a medical curiosity and then into a celebrated object of interest for polite society. Are his well-heeled new friends really so different from the rubberneckers who gawped at him for tuppence a time? And are we?

In David Lynch’s film about Merrick, John Hurt gives an astonishing performance from beneath mounds of prosthetics. On stage Merrick’s deformities are conveyed by the physical skills of the actor. Joe Duttine achieves this admirably here, his legs bowed, his back painfully distorted, his eyes poignantly avid and earnest above a twisted mouth. Duttine brings a lightness and a dogged, questioning intellect to the role that sidesteps mawkishness. There are flashes of anger when he is patronised by Antony Byrne’s conflicted Treves, and hopeless yearning in his exchanges with the glamorous actress Mrs Kendal (a poised, sparkling Catherine Kanter), who, in allowing him to gaze at her naked body, permits him a glimpse of erotic pleasures he will never taste.

Problematically, Merrick is more interesting than the many debates with which Pomerance surrounds him: the opposition between faith and science, and the uneasy relationship of Treves’s careerism with his desire to do good, his doctor’s objectivity struggling against his human compassion. It gives the drama an alienating air of contrivance. But Jones’s cast are deft and, thanks to Duttine’s impressive turn and the continuing compulsion of Merrick’s short, sad life, the show rolls on.

— Box office: 020-8985 2424 to Sat; then Richmond Theatre to April 5

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