Roderick Cairns in Yours the Face; photo ​by Sarah Walker.
Our culture is becoming a progressively more aesthetic one and superficial too. It affects us in many ways but few more worryingly than in our modes of decision making. We make judgements based on how things appear rather than how they are, the latter being a complicated combination of relative opinions and knowledge we have to go looking for. Yours the Face examines our image obsessed culture through two image obsessed characters. Played by a single actor, it’s an intriguing journey into all that lies behind the image and our need to perfect it.
Yours the Face follows the relationship between a photographer and model, whose scars are initially as well hidden as the airbrushed images they create. The pernicious influences of the high fashion world becomes quickly evident in the nature of their interactions. Indeed it’s hard to believe that a relationship of any sort, even friendship comes from it, but the fact that a believable one does says as much about the subject matter as it does about the writing and performance. The insidiousness of the former and the quality of the latter.
In an unexpectedly physical performance, Roderick Cairns embodies the androgyny required to flit between a male and female character. His ability to hold court and craft the distinct yet intertwined characters that he does is impressive, as is the tenuous and ephemeral link between them that he is able to create. In Peter we find an arrogant and insecure photographer with a morbid fascination with beauty, in Missy his contradictory subject. That she is lonely is clear but it’s her relationship with her ugly past that is most interesting. The ugliness isn’t confined to her physical appearance, which became that of a model very late, but of her self. Inner and outer beauty tend be inversely related in these kinds of stories but with Missy the opposite seems true and in her escape she seems to find at least contrition if not happiness. She evokes a beguiling mix of sympathy and dislike.
Spoiler alert but this play does contain full frontal nudity and while certainly confronting, it may not have been necessary. There was ironically enough meat on the story and characters not to need it and for me, detracted from the androgyny that Cairns was so successfully able to maintain. Missy’s troubled past also went a little too far and considering the amount of time available to explore it, it could have been dialled back with equal if not greater effect.
Beyond these two relatively minor excesses, Yours the Face balances drama and authenticity well and leaves you with that strange mixture of pleasure, self-consciousness and stinging eyes that follow the camera’s flash.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Yours the Face
By Fleur Kilpatrick
Director: Sarah Walker
Artistic Consultant: Rob Reid
Design Consultant: Rob Sowinski
Set Designer: Sarah Walker
Performer: Roderick Cairns
Sound Designer: Tom Pitts
Dramaturgy: Raimondo Cortese
Presented as part of the FLIGHT Festival of new Writing
Theatre Works, St Kilda
31 July to 9 August
