Everyone loves a freak show, and there are few figures who have caught the sentimental imagination more than John Merrick.

A man so disfigured he kept himself covered as he shuffled through Victorian London, he became the most unlikely of celebrities.

It would be easy to slip into smoke-and-mirrors gothic melodrama in Bernard Pomerance’s play, first made famous when David Bowie played Merrick on Broadway. As it is, Jemima Levick’s stylish and fluid production initially has the apparently normal world occupied by pop-eyed grotesques made even more exaggerated in the face of Merrick’s serenity.

The big reveal isn’t done with prosthetics, but teases with archive slides of the real Merrick projected on to a curtained-off cube presided over by Robin Laing’s ambitious doctor, Treeves.

When Kevin Lennon does appear as Merrick, he’s more effete than anything and no more ill at ease with the world than any other enfant terrible. Lennon’s sensitive handling of the role is everything here, and even when Merrick makes his sexual feelings plain to actress Mrs Kendall, there’s wit framing the exchange.

Alex Lowde’s big industrial-looking set opens on an endless array of Kafkaesque corridors, later hemmed in for Merrick’s goldfish-bowl existence.

The metallic echoes that punctuate each scene resemble a prison rather than a hospital. As Merrick holds court, he becomes a passive barometer for a society that patronises and exploits exotic species like himself.

As a play, this is a difficult juggling act and Levick and co have excelled themselves by investing subtlety and depth into a work which, like its subject, is easily fetishised in a thrill-seeking world.

Star rating: ****