A photographer and his subject, a beautiful
but damaged model, are played by the same actor in Fleur Kilpatrick’s ‘duet for
solo voice’ Yours the Face. The
function of the conceit – and it is one that mostly works – is, according to
the playwright, to prevent the audience’s objectification of a female actor in
the role of a model.
Roderick Cairns is excellent in both modes,
physically lithe and emotionally brittle as the troubled Emmy, hard-edged and
unaffected as the straight-talking Aussie photographer Peter. Kilpatrick milks
the contrast between the outwardly genteel model and the gruff photographer to
sustained and successful comic effect. One of the pleasures of this production
is watching Cairns keep up with these tonal shifts which grow steadily darker
as more is revealed of Emmy’s chequered past.
The couple meet, naturally, at a shoot,
their respective solitudes cancelling each other out in a blaze of studio light
flashes and pounding techno. The honeymoon period is brief as the jet setting and
drugs take their toll and the old silences of their lives return, alone
together, the weight of personal demons ultimately crushing the thrill of young
love.
Kilpatrick’s writing is sharp and grittily
profane but often funny, reminiscent in places of contemporary American
dramatists such as Neil LaBute and David Mamet. The playwright’s program notes
gesture towards another stateside influence, realist painter Edward Hopper, in
their evocation of lost souls permanently in transit, belonging only in ‘airport
terminals, in hotel lobbies, in hire cars’.
The play is not, however, as melancholic as
all that, mostly because the set up is not that of one of Hopper’s icy
Midwestern tableaus, but rather that of a classic odd couple tale, told in brisk
monologues whose backdrop is the razzle-dazzle world of high fashion. There is
something inscrutable about both Emmy and Peter which this reviewer found
frustrating, but their uneven, quietly obsessional relationship is lent a
graspable reality by Cairns’ skilfully distinct characterisations. The
inevitable breakup, when it comes, is strange and affecting.
While it is playing, Yours the Face is unquestionably enjoyable, its studied interiority
making for an intimate and involving experience. Afterwards, however, I felt
uncertain what its casually satisfying parts amounted to. There are intriguing
suggestions in Kilpatrick’s script of bigger stories – of the costs and
consequences of physical beauty, of the alienating effects of globalisation, of
the differing narcissisms of both the loved and the unloved – but nothing quite
sticks. It is perhaps, too, an unintended result of Cairns’ bravura soloing
that it is easy to see Yours the Face as
a play which does not add up to much more than a performance vehicle, albeit an
unusually well-crafted and pleasurable one.
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