When fashionable actress Madge Kendal visits Joseph Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), she describes the theatre as ‘the most beautiful place on earth’ as ‘romance’ before they share a touching rendition of Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting. In the original script, which Lynch co-wrote, Kendal is allowed a more lengthy rhapsody:

It’s very difficult to put into a nutshell, but I should say the theatre is the shrine of the imagination, where one may suspend disbelief and travel anywhere in the world, to any time you desire. You may look over the shoulders of kings, unobserved, battle with ruthless tyrants, and marry the beautiful princess, all in the space of a few hours. Onstage you may be whoever you wish to be, do anything you please, and always, always live happily ever after.

The Elephant Man (1980)

This sense of the theatre as a locus of liberation from the restrictions of the everyday, as escapism from the self and from defeat is tantalising for Merrick, trapped in a body which is a mockery of his own intelligence and character, but it is also an explicit engagement with a world which is deeply woven into the fabric of Lynch’s cinema. Lynch famously asserted that each of his great films contained an ‘Eye of the Duck’ scene, a lapidary moment which is perfectly formed and located, and without which the film would be incomplete. Those which Lynch himself has identified are instructive, they include Merrick’s trip to the theatre, Ben’s mimed performance of ‘In Dreams’ in Blue Velvet (1986) and the Club Silencio sequence of Mulholland Drive (2001). Each of these is intimately related to the stage, and to the meaning of performance.