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 The Trial Of Jane Fonda

The Trial of Jane Fonda

by Terry Jastrow

Miss Fonda Regrets

http://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

There are moments in history when we folks outside America maybe underestimate the will of the American people, whatever their hue and politics to bind together when their country is attacked. Yet the popular view is the conflict in Vietnam was lost on the home front when press and public turned against the US military campaign.

This stylish but somewhat stactic production directed by Joe Harmston and designed by Sean Cavanagh, deals with a true story, one legacy of Vietnam which may seem almost trivial to us compared to the many issues thrown up by American military intervention, sending in ordinary Joes and Janes as the "world's policemen" (and policewomen).

Yet it reflects a febrile  atmosphere, a cross over of media and military, sincerity and playacting, politics and frankness,  all uneasily contained and threatening to explode and splinter, focussed on one woman. 

The Trial of Jane Fonda, written by Terry Jastrow, takes place in 1988. 

It imagines what occurred during a real-life private meeting organised by an Episcopalian minister between middle-aged movie star, Jane Fonda, a political peace activist in her younger days who now expresses regret for some of her actions,  and male Vietnam military veterans in Waterbury, Connecticut.

The men were trying to have the town boycott the filming of her latest movie (one minute 15 seconds in) which co-starred Robert De Niro, viewing her as "Hanoi Jane", a traitor to the soldiers who fought on the orders of their country in the former French colony of Vietnam.

Fourteen years earlier, during her Paris marriage to film director Roger Vadim, invited to visit Hanoi by the North Vietnamese, she had been filmed and photographed astride an anti-aircraft gun used against American planes and had made a controversial broadcast.

This is a strange play. The vets are boiled down to five types: The public servant lawyer Larry Bonk (Alex Gaumond), the Ohio bond trader Buzzy Banks (Christien Anholt), Tommy Lee Cook (Mark Rose), the guy "between jobs" with a gift for crude caricature, injured by a grenade Reggie Wells (Ako Mitchell) and the Italian-American father of a dead soldier, Tony Celano II (Paul Herzberg).

All the elements are there for a stonking drama, even if dealing with living people, a certain amount of discipline obviously has to be exercised. But this sort of parameter can lead to an even more dramatically interesting examination. The intelligence is there but it is weirdly flat-lined in the script of this one act play with the flare ups between the men, the easier to grasp action, oddly isolated and ritualized.

For it eould be a fascinating and all-too-human situation, if it were amplified. Indeed, despite the black and white videos and the still projections of Jane Fonda who, in her words in the play "wanted to be taken seriously" plus audio recordings, this feels like a play without a context. 

As far as we can garner from the internet, the working class municipality of Waterbury, the main business of which was making bullet casings,  had welcomed the job creation and other economic potential of filmmakers coming to town. Yet noone with any ounce of the civility and respect due to those who had made a career, as well as those who were conscripted, in the military could disregard a letter to a local newspaper from an army veteran.

While the analogy with Twelve Angry Men, the iconic movie starring Fonda's part Italian Episcopalian turned agnostic father, seeems clunky, it is somehow psychological appropriate to the situation. When past hostilities reignite and the demure, almost matronly, Fonda (played by Fatal Attraction's Anne Archer)  is accused of using quotes rather speaking her mind, her rebuke does somehow work, "I'm an actress, that's what I do".    

The images are potent, from luscious Barbarella to helmeted peace activist and then the prim Jane of the meeting, having reinvented herself as fitness guru and with a more conservative look in keeping with the general swing of the US towards a more conservative stance

But she is always a woman encircled  by men. Whether in Vietnam or in the church hall meeting arranged by the minister John (Martin Fisher) who nervously takes nips of Scotch and at one point removes his dog collar, as if it were a prop, and thrown it challengingly into the centre of the room

The word "Trial" itself in the title may give a clue. The obvious parallel is the celebrated courtroom drama Yet trial can also mean an audition, a test for selection into the team, however unstable the selection process.

OK, we're going round the houses on this, mainly because this feels like an extract of something else. In between the distribution of points of view and violent prejudices, thrre are revelations but more documentary information than drama. 

And having done a little research on Google, we also wonder whether this is a show which would mean more to Americans who understand that with every Middle East conflict with American troops involved, Fonda, as a woman still in the public eye, becomes once again a target. Some would say for displaced anger and frustration tinged by misogyny.  

It's a play that's made us think hard and, in a world where inaccurate content on social media can destroy a person without reaching the light of day in the mainstream press, we have striven to be accurate. 

Nevertheless it needs more context as a play for British audiences even if there are intriguing glimpses of a difficult story which is well-worth dramatizing. An amber light from a sober TLT and her equally thoughtful vehicle.