Arts Preview: The Elephant Man looks at the nature of beauty

Looks may not be everything, but they certainly count for something, as actor and director Nigel Miles-Thomas was reminded last year.

Miles-Thomas was touring Asia with theatre company Performance Exchange in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was presented at the Fringe Club.

"My very handsome son was touring with the play, and he had constant female attention, while his ageing father had very little," he recalls. "I said 'I feel like the Elephant Man', in jest, of course. But I thought about the idea of adapting the story when I went to bed that night."

The story of Joseph Merrick, often wrongly called John Merrick - has been dramatised before on both stage and screen. Born in Britain in 1862, Merrick was so severely deformed that during his early 1920s he was exhibited in a freak show as "the Elephant Man".

He later lived in what is now the Royal London Hospital under the care of surgeon Frederick Treves. He was just 27 years old when he died. A 1979 play called The Elephant Man, by Bernard Pomerance, was a Broadway hit, and in 1980 a film directed by David Lynch with the same title, but not based on the play, starred John Hurt as Merrick.