A Perfect Specimen | Black Swan State Theatre | State Theatre Centre of Western Australia | Until July 17th | ★★★
‘A Perfect Specimen’ is a new play developed through Black Swan State Theatre Company’s emerging writer’s program. Bringing new works to the stage is essential for a lively and relevant theatre industry, and playwright Nathaniel Moncrieff has discovered an intriguing true life tale.
Julia Pastrana was a Mexican woman who was born with a series of genetic and medical conditions that resulted in her having an unusual appearance. Her face and body were covered with thick black hair, while she also had an unusually large ears and nose and a double row of teeth.
Pastrana was bought by showman Theodore Lent, who later married her. Lent toured the world with a circus freak show, and his wife was his star attraction. While Julia was famed for her odd appearance, she was also highly intelligent – speaking several languages.
When Julia died aged just 26, shortly after giving birth to a deformed child, who also didn’t survive, her husband didn’t let her death stop the show. He had both her and the baby mummified and continued to exhibit her body to the crowds. Death didn’t end Julia Pastrana’s suffering.
The performance takes places on a circus stage. Rich red curtains are draped on either side, and the show begins with ring master Theodore Lent taking to the circular podium and calling the audiences attention.
The stage rotates throughout the show with different characters and settings getting on and off the magic roundabout. It’s a great staging technique that allowed the story to travel and move at a dramatic pace.
We enter the world of the travelling performers and a man who takes advantage of his wife’s strange looks to make money.
Luke Hewitt as Lent delivers a powerful and engaging depiction. It’s one of his finest performances to date. He delicately balances the different sides of Lent’s character, a man who is clearly flawed and despicable, but Hewitt successfully made him human and rounded.
Adriane Daff, a wonderful actress, takes on the challenging role of playing Julia Pastrana. Her performance is fine, but the way this play is presented robs the actress of what could have potentially been a brilliant role.
Director Stuart Halusz biggest decision in staging this play must have been choosing how to physically show Pastrana’s deformity. The solution has been an artistic one, rather than resort to prosthetic, masks or make up Pastrana is presented simply as a woman. While Theodore Lent appears with a ghoulish white face, underlining the central question of the play, who is the real monster?
In considering how to tackle this challenge we’re reminded of other works that have tackled similar ground, one relevant example would be Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play ‘The Elephant Man’. In that production the actor showed John Merrick’s deformity solely by physical performance, while David Lynch’s 1980 film utilised costuming and prosthesis to create the character.
This productions answer to the the challenge is a much more cerebral solution, we are asked to look beyond the physicality of these characters and examine their souls. Intellectually it works, theatrically it’s more challenging to pull off.
Alongside Hewitt and Daff in the central roles, Igos Sas appears as scientist Dr Gregory Alyokhin, and Greg McNeil is captivating as Lent’s colleague Cornell Wurlitzer, Rebecca Davis plays Lent’s jealous lover.
With capable performances, a well written script and great staging and direction, alongside creative lighting and costuming all the ingredients are in place for a knock-out production, but somehow it seems that this show has failed to land any body blows. Intriguing, but disappointingly not outstanding.
In Conversation with Nathaniel Moncrieff
Playwright Nathaniel Moncrieff spoke to OUTinPerth about writing ‘A Perfect Specimen’ ahead of the plays opening night.
When did you first come across the story of Julia Pastrana?
I probably first came across it around 2008. I was sharing a house with a few other people in North Perth and a friend of mine I lived with passed on a pile of books that he thought I would like. There was a Billie Holiday biography in there, and also in the pile was a book called ‘Very Special People’.
Basically it was a very pulpy ’70s paperback that detailed the lives of all these famous carnival performers from the 1900’s. Julia Pastrana’s story was one that I wasn’t aware of, there was a whole chapter devoted to her. It was such a strange and sprawling story, I assumed it was a piece of fiction.
I looked it up and discovered it was true and from there I just became more and more fascinated about the tale. It stuck with me for a number of years and I was always relay it to friends and they would tell me to write a play about it.
It’s such a big story and I felt it was an important one, it wasn’t until Black Swan gave me the opportunity that I sat down and forced myself to work about how it could be put on stage.
It’s challenging as a writer when you find a great story but you know you’ve got to hang on to it until the time is right.
Exactly because it’s such a great story and I thought it had such great potential. I started it at one point, and even though that scene I wrote still ended up in the play, I kind of ‘held off’ because I wanted to be sure that I could do it justice.
Quite a few writers have done adaptations of Julia Pastrana’s story, have you come across any of the other works based on her life?
I haven’t, but Adriane Daff who plays Julia recently pointed one adaptation out to me, I think it’s called ‘The Ape Woman’ and it’s directed by Marco Ferreri who I’m a big fan of. He did ‘Tales of Ordinary Madness’ and ‘La Grande Bouffe’, these really outrageous satirical films, but I hadn’t come across it in my research.
I did come across one recent American production, it was an audio piece. Obviously the writer didn’t know how to put Julia on stage.
I always knew this was going to be one of the biggest challenges, over the years I’ve spoken to a number of directors about how they would do it and they all have different ideas. Stuart, the director of this production, and I talked about it at great length.
He talked to the designers and the actors and came to a decision which I think is the right decision. I think people will understand the decision he’s made and I think it affects the themes of the play.
Graeme Watson
Image: Igor Sas and Luke Hewitt in ‘A Perfect Specimen’ photo by Daniel James
