Review The Ugly One

Tim Gopsill finds a satire on identity and the body beautiful catches a zeitgeist but fails to fulfil its full potential.
 
The Ugly One
by Marius von Mayenberg

Face Value
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Marius von Mayenberg's 2007 black comedy is resonant in our age of selfies and self-branding,  revolving round the conceit anything can now be replicated  and mass produced.

In fact this German satire centres on a solo main premise and joke and, luckily, it is a clever one, even if there is a clunkiness about the accompanying gags and plot development.

When Lette (Charlie Dorfman), a brilliant electronics engineer, is considered by his bosses too ugly to promote his own invention, his assistant Karlmann (Arian Nik impressive in his debut professional role) gets the job and accompanying perks.

Lette then opts for what he assumes is an exclusive solution, plastic surgery turning him into the acknowledged most handsome man in the world and giving him back the gig for which he was originally so unceremoniously turned down.

However  he doesn't foresee the plastic surgeon (T'nia Miller) capitalising on the success of the brand she has created out of him and profiting from mass production, effectively making Lette obsolete.

His assistant and subsequent rival Karlmann emerges with an indentikit face. The two even end up competing for two women, Lette's wife Fanny and a businesswoman (both played by Indra Ové).  

The female roles involve a good deal of squirming and slinking about in a seductive fashion  at which, it must be said, Ové excels.

Lette's spouse Fanny gets most of the really corny laughs. As Lette’s invention is some kind of hardware plug, Fanny, in her seductive passages,  has so many cringeworthy gags about plugs, sockets and the like that it all skirts dangerously near to the tiresome.

Director Weise's and designer Loren Elstein’s staging is ingenious, using the Park 90. the smaller studio space, filling it with a square rostrum functioning as work desk, table and bed.

Meanwhile the floor space is also a projection screen (projection designer Louise Rhoades-Brown).

Weise has plenty of boisterous comic physicality in his production, but his direction also lacks a light touch.

The play deals with such an abstract issue in Maja Zade's translation, greater subtlety and a tad more whimsy in both the acting and the direction would have been welcome. Instead everything  feels rather signposted and heavy-handed.

The plot eventually takes its narcissistic logic to the extreme and this certainly is a play with an intriguing premise. It's energetically directed and acted by Weise and its four-strong cast with lighting by Amy Mae and sound by Giles Thomas.

However it needs more nuance, along with much sharper, pacier timing, to make the satire really sting and The Ugly One therefore gets an amber light.

Review Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead [Preview]

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

The Lost Boys
http://www.oldvictheatre.com/

Hot on the heels of the video editor's Hamlet, comes a revival of Tom Stoppard's first playwriting success, the 50-year-old tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead.

In 1967  two bit characters in Shakespeare's tragedy were plucked from obscurity, first by a young writer, then by an Observer critic and finally by the literary manager of the National Theatre. 

"We're just over the moon, it's better than winning the pools, we've been in work for 50 years," says Guildenstern - or is it Rosencrantz ...?*

For those a tad too young to know, the football pools were one of the two ways of winning big money  in 1967, the other being Post Office Premium Bonds.

OK, ok, we're being tongue-in-cheek and metatheatrical as the Old Vic - the original home of the National Theatre between 1963 and 1976 - celebrates half a century of the Danish twosome in Stoppard's play.

This time it's the turn of Joshua McGuire and Daniel Radcliffe to take on the double act with David Haig taking up the mantle as the Player King. (who, by the way, speaks fluent Danish for, some might say, rather Stoppardian absurdist reasons).

Directed by David Leveaux,  Radcliffe is the more passive Rosencrantz, gaining in confidence during the play as the wide-eyed little lost boy who wants to "go home" and showing a knack for comedy timing. Meanwhile McGuire grasps the mettle as the fruity-voiced leader of the pair, Guildenstern, and both are clothed in traditional brown and green jerkins with satchels from their shoulders

But Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are also children let loose from the nursery, set against an unrolled cloudy blue sky, half Simpsons cartoon-like, half Michaelangelo Sistine Chapel sky (set design Anna Fleischle, lighting Howard Harrison). After all, unlike Hamlet we do not see or know their parentage. Yet, the child-like aspect is emphasised by a picture book quality to the costumes, as if the Danish royal Court has steeped itself in the pastels of Le Petit Prince.

King Claudius (Wil Johnson) has a paper crown, Queen Gertrude (Marianne Oldham) has an outsize Elizabethan ruff topping a scarlet dress with hooped skirt halting above the ankles. Polonius (William Chubb has a gold braid and Danish  pastel blue jacket with a fairy-tale blonde Orphelia (Helena Wilson), similarly in pastel blue (costumes Anna Fleischle and Lori Epstein).

Hamlet (Luke Mullins) is a confident, languid first rank public schoolboy, all in black, smoothly outwitting the two attendants mired in trying to work out their place in things as tantalizing snippets of the Shakespeare play emerge and disappear around them.

For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not acting extras but characters who know only their own lines - when they remember them - and are blocked from knowing the whole story. Haig's Player King enters Brechtian style with a cart but accompanied by a pierrot/commedia del arte band with a klezmer feel (composer Colin Buckeridge).

Indeed Haig's scene-stealing Player King, in an unbuttoned red toy soldier scarlet jacket, has a touch of Fagin about him as well as a slightly Pinteresque menace as he draws the curtain across the stage with what looks like Brueghel's painting of Icarus's fall when the sun melts his wings, suffering while life goes on around him.
 
Any production of Shakespeare's Hamlet has to overcome its status as a play filled with quotes, bringing freshness to the text. So Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has to compete now against a plethora of parodies where the premise of two characters hanging around, waiting for their cue is hardly novel.

Yet as we have pointed out in our review of the 2011 Trevor Nunn production, for all the theorizing about probability and literary in-jokes, there is heart and drama at the centre of Stoppard's play. The deracinated pair at times almost seem like refugees in their un-knowledge of what is going on around them and their fates dictated by others, both in person and in paperwork.

This is a solid production with a winsome quality of the nursery mixed with the sting of ill chance and looming death. On its 50th anniversary, it seems the dictum of that well-known stand up Karl Marx still stands up: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." It's an amber/green light for a play which has now has entered theatrical history but still keeps its edge, both as farce and tragedy.

*We should say that's an off the record quote from Rosencrantz - or - um - Guildenstern, in case you go to the show and wonder why that line isn't in it. OK, we admit it, it's fake news  - we made that one up ... 😉