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 |  | Zygo - The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant death of Julia Pastrana, The Ugliest Woman in the World at the Warwick Arts Centre 4 November 2002.
Review by site user Charles Lloyd
The True History...was an ambitious but ultimately disappointing attempt to stage a play entirely in the dark.
As a practice that arises from a company with blind or partially-sighted performers, this is a worthy experiment.
Despite this I'm unsure if this format, or at least this play, makes interesting theatre-going for anyone else.
The story
The play was about the life of Julia Pastrana, a Mexican Indian woman whose grotesque appearance forced her into a career as a sideshow attraction.
| Μύ |  | Full poster for The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant death of Julia Pastrana
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The darkness
Shaun Prendergast, the play's author, decided that casting Julia was virtually impossible - makeup, for some reason, being ruled out - and so he opted to stage his sideshow in the dark, leaving Julia's exact appearance to the imagination.
Yet for a production that ostensibly sought to create empathy with the sideshow performer, surely there was another option.
Being performed in the dark was the play's major innovation and was certainly a new experience for most.
Theatre in the dark is, for the audience, a bit like listening to a live radio play and a bit like a sensory deprivation experiment - sounds and voices emerge around you, sometimes shocking in their closeness, and this is occasionally quite effective.
But in this show, the effect wore thin. The True History was only an hour long, indicating something about the slenderness of the material.
Freak shows
Both the content of the play and the conundrum of casting brought to mind Mat Fraser's recent television programme, in which he candidly explored the past and present nature of 'freak shows'.
Quite unexpectedly, Fraser discovered that the traditional stereotypes about the passive victimhood or exploitation of freak show performers are unjustified. Indeed, there are still freak shows today where performers with disabilities or deformities can make a good living.
Had The True History cast a performer such as the person Fraser met up with, the play would have gone much further towards presenting Pastrana as a human being, rather than simply a freak.
But as it was, the play took the carney-barker's spiel far too literally. Sitting in the dark, the audience was forced to accept the booming, sing-song voice of Lent, the barker, when he announced that Pastrana was almost too ugly to look upon. The audience has no choice but to agree, and in doing so empathised with Lent, not Julia Pastrana.
Disappointing ending
In the end we were told little about Julia the person, as opposed to Julia the freak. We were told that Julia was a Mexican Indian, but were given no idea how she ended up in the freak business.
The 'triumphant' nature of Julia's death, announced in the title, was also nowhere apparent.
Ultimately she amounts to little more than an illustration of the very stereotypes Mat Fraser so effectively put to rest.
Sadly, The True History was more in tune with the showman's rhetoric than any attempt to discover the truth about Julia Pastrana.
It played on our voyeuristic desire for the spectacle of deformity, but allowed us to cloak our suspect desires in the modesty of darkness.
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