Peeling Soho Theatre, London W1
The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World BAC, London SW11
Sorrows and Rejoicings Tricycle Theatre, London NW6
Bones Hampstead Theatre, London NW3
'Cripping up,' drawls Caroline Parker in Peeling 'is the twenty-first-century answer to blacking up.' She's talking about the likelihood that when Hollywood wants a very short person for a film, it'll cast Cameron Diaz and digitally shrink her. She's speaking from the vantage-point of Alfa, a deaf woman, who's flanked by Sophie Partridge's Coral, who sits in an electric wheelchair, and by Beaty, played by Lisa Hammond, who is four feet tall. Perhaps, Alfa suggests to Beaty, a film director could 'blow you up to size'. 'I am to size, thank you, fuck-face,' says Beaty.
This is Graeae, the theatre company established 20 years ago to 'redress the exclusion of people with physical and sensory impairments from performance'.
Kaite O'Reilly's clever but over-complicated play shows people slowly, crossly yielding up their secrets. It also shows what makes people feel left out. These women are the Chorus in a production of The Trojan Women: Hammond gives a lovely sample of what she would do were she asked to play Andromache, while knowing it'll probably never happen.
The originality of Jenny Sealey's production lies in its manifold loquaciousness. This is a story told and untold in many different ways. The script is displayed on a screen - apparently for the benefit of the deaf, but also to cast an ironic glow on everything that's said. The action is described by the performers, perhaps for the blind, but also, sardonically, for the short-sighted in the audience. Parker is a gloriously eloquent signer: no one could mistake her repeated finger-in-the-doughnut gesture for anything other than a swearing riff.
In the nineteenth century, the performers in Peeling would most likely have been co-opted into someone else's show. Shaun Prendergast's 'true history' conjures up the life of Julia Pastrana, a South American Indian who was sold by her parents to a travelling freak show: she found herself advertised alongside the 'boy with a face like a fish' and the 'man with elastic skin'. Pastrana's claim to fame (which would hardly have had the same resonance had she been a man) was 'ugliness': the gloating voice of her manager - who became her husband - explains that with her huge nostrils and hairy forehead she is 'the doyenne of disfigurement'.
But the intensity of Andrea Brooks's production comes from the fact that you don't see a thing. The theatre is plunged into total darkness. Brooks avoids the deadly literalness that compares the idea of 'ugly' to its realisation. She deprives the audience of the point of a freak show: you can't ogle. Instead, she provides an evocative soundscape: the sounds of rainfall, the rustle of a dress, the slosh and spit of someone cleaning their teeth outside a caravan (you have to be told about the caravan - no sound effect is that specific), and the sweet tones of Pastrana's voice.
Even after her death Pastrana toured. She gave birth to a baby (who looked like her - her cry when she first sees her child is ghastly), who lived for only a few days. When Pastrana died soon after, her husband pickled the pair of them and took them around the fairgrounds. The final sensation provided by this disturbing show is the smell of formaldehyde.
Athol Fugard has been putting the experiences of unregarded people on the stage for 40 years: he has been helped to form our ideas of what South Africa is. The Island, first produced in 1973, proved still rich and compelling during its recent London run. But he might seem to have set himself an impossible task with his new play. Sorrows and Rejoicings is heavily symbolic, often declamatory; the action it describes is remembered rather than enacted. Which just goes to prove what a real dramatist, with something substantial to convey, can do. Fugard provides such absorbing images of exile and of painful change that you are drawn into the heart of post-apartheid South Africa.
The new young country - 'on its wobbly legs' - is there in the shape of an ankle-socked schoolgirl, the child of a Coloured maid and her white employer, scowling at the threshold of a room in a house once owned by whites. The old divisions are there as, after her lover's funeral, the girl's mother confronts his widow. The meeting between the women is hard and vital: their entrenched distrust doesn't melt, but begins to exist alongside the recognition by each of what the other has suffered.
All this has the weight of political significance, but it doesn't feel merely like metaphor. Both women's histories - the physical discomforts, emotional bruises and giddy pleasures - are precisely drawn. Both histories are embodied with wonderful exactness: by Denise Newman, used to sorrow and silence, who suddenly blossoms into glee - and by Jennifer Steyn, who receives a kiss from her husband with a snaking movement of her head that suggest both flinch and welcome. Steyn can't help but run her finger along the big family table as if checking for dust; Newman mops at it with her duster. Domestic in its detail, Sorrows and Rejoicings also vividly conjures the feeling of a big hot land with its blue gums, grey veldt, thorn-tree honey and 'long fly-swatting days'. Fugard's anxiety and aspiration has a long reach.
You couldn't say that of Bones. But there's a pocket-sized punch to each aspect of Peter Straughan's astute play. The poxy back-screen area of a porn cinema is dwarfed by fuzzy grey images of giant interlocking knees. Four would-be toughs and one fraudulent hood try out their swaggers with an air of kids wearing their fathers' trenchcoats. The plot is improbable, but the psychology that drives it - male nervousness getting excited by violence - is plausible. The gags are good; Max Roberts's direction is pacey. Straughan is a talent to watch.
