Image: The Blue Room Theatre
When Roderick Cairns first takes the stage, his character is ambiguous. He – or as we find out later, she – is introspective and delicate, with a purring American accent and high-toned voice. First impressions are made, preconceptions drawn on and curiosity piqued. And then she changes. Now he is gruff and abrupt, with a deep voice and Aussie accent. His posture adjusts and his eye movements hasten. The changes are not overt – Cairns resists overplaying the distinctions between his male and female characters – but they are definite.
Playwright Fleur Kilpatrick retired from modeling at the age of 23, after becoming disturbed at the more impersonal aspects of the trade. She has drawn on some of that experience for Yours the Face, a story about a nineteen-year-old fashion model who has an affair with her Australian photographer while in London for a shoot. Both characters are damaged and deeply flawed, and Kilpatrick’s script delves unflinchingly into their psyches, highlighting simple detail to illuminate all corners of them. Notably, she gives Emmy – who, as a supermodel, is traditionally reduced to an object inside a lens – the sort of voice that reveals the human in her. Not that Peter, her photographer, notices. His focus remains riveted on her beauty, even as his obsession develops, and he remains forever separated from his world by the glass and plastic of his camera.
Yours the Face is a play for a single actor, and earlier incarnations of the piece experimented with a woman in the role. Emmy’s beauty is a major focus, however, and with a female actor, this beauty inevitably settles into the physical restraints of the performer. With a male in the lead, beauty remains ambiguous and takes its own grand dimensions in the mind of the audience. Cairns’ male body acquires an androgyny defined entirely by his performance. He is not male or female, but simply a human frame, upon which the audience builds accordingly. His body is like bony Plasticine, slipping so fluidly and accurately between genders that transitions evaporate and two people seem to appear onstage. Cairns plays his characters with enormous restraint and a primed energy that winds the whole piece up until its mechanisms creak.
Sarah Walker, the designer and co-director (alongside Robert Reid) of Yours the Face is a photographer herself and her experience is present throughout. The set is a photography studio, and the lights behind the photography umbrellas backlight Peter and Emmy into eerie silhouettes in some scenes, and then drench their every angle in others. The productions elements are almost a character themselves, crashing over Cairns with impressive texture and intensity.
Misleading marketing and an unfortunate title has failed to illustrate the sheer brilliance of this piece of theatre. Yours the Face is a stunning, multi-layered work that offers deep insight into an industry fueled by manipulated vulnerability and flippant disconnect. Or, more accurately, into the humans buried inside.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Yours the Face
The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights and Quiet Little Fox present:
Written by Fleur Kilpatrick
Directed by Sarah Walker and Robert Reid
Performed by Roderick Cairns
Designed by Sarah Walker
Sound design by Tom Pitts
Dramaturgy by Raimondo Cortese
3-7 February 2015
