Theatre Review – The Elephant Girls

The very best live theatre is the stuff that piques the curiosity and sends the viewer off down a rabbit hole of learning and experience.

Shortly after my husband told me about an upcoming BBC series about the 40 Elephants, we came across a listing for Margo MacDonald’s one-woman play The Elephant Girls at Buddies in Bad Times. Part of Buddies Pride programming for this year, the play moves on to the Winnipeg Fringe Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this summer.

MacDonald tells the story of the 40 Elephants through the eyes of the fictional Maggie Hale (partially based on the real-life Maggie Hughes/Hill, a high ranking member of the group). The all-girl gang associated with the Elephant and Castle gang, and estimated to have been in existence for almost 200 years, came to their heyday in the 1920s when thirty or so of the women at a time would swarm shops like Selfridges, pocketing jewelry, cosmetics, clothes and accessories, then dump the stolen goods in a get-away car to be fenced.

First intrigued by the story of the 40 Elephants in author Brian MacDonald’s Gangs of London (no relation to the actor of this piece but he is the nephew of one of the main Elephant and Castle gang members from the era), Margo MacDonald has done extensive and diligent research into the gang to give voice and flesh to a small cast of the most important characters and events.

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