More's the pity. Here is a burning national issue that involves a fragment of the populace and virtually the entire elephant population. Powerful stuff for the stage. De Soyza made best use of it when he let the narrative tell its own tale. When the story skimmed perilously close to his own experience, it threatened to castrate the urgency.
Diatribes can be deadly, achieving the opposite from that which they set out to effect.
Michael is a man who does his utmost away from the spotlight to champion the dying cause of Elephas maximas. In the glare of the footlights, Jude, his alter ego, seemed curiously ambivalent. At times impetuous about the fate of the beast he both knows and likes, at others vehement in asserting the rights of the elephant's nemesis, humankind. Fiery though he may be, the playwright is fair - and that may be his undoing, at least as far as convincing the audience was concerned. It is reasonable to assume that convincing the audience into a like-minded state was the writer's intention.