Director

Kat Henry

DeerHouse Pictures

Dirk Hoult
Photo: Belinda Davis

Norman Doyle and Kevin Spink
Photo: Belinda Davis

Kathryn Fray and Kevin Spink
Photo: Belinda Davis

Kevin Spink
Photo: Belinda Davis

"I'll start with the nose because it's furthest from the face" - Scheffler

Arriving on the second floor of the !MetroArts building I was welcomed warmly by a lady in a white coat into a room equally antiseptic in its whiteness. Local video artists deerhouse production help establish an ambiance on arrival, painting the walls with projected video of constantly self-disfiguring faces. Other walls are adorned with segmented stills from local photographer Nikki Lake. Scars and open wounds pepper the walls and help frame the pictures and help set an eerie tone. 

Moments later the women in white-coats are back and guide us to our seats without so much as a “doctor will see you now”. Upon being seated you're welcomed (via muzak of the Kenny G variety) directly into a room as familiar as any doctor’s waiting room you've ever visited, minus the outdated copies of Woman's Day.

For someone who used to get queasy at Flying Doctors and A Country Practice I started to become a little nervous. Would I be subjected to endless discussions of sinew and sinus, bone and bodily functions? The lights dimmed and I could feel my stomach clench.

Hopefully a singular experience for anyone visiting the delightful new production at !MetroArts, THE UGLY ONE, and I’m happy to note my fear was misplaced. Despite a single scene which had me a little queasy the show is far more surgical in it’s deconstruction of our own fears and self doubt than of it’s cast members. 

This delightful modern combination of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein and a rather obscure Twilight Zone episode entitled “The Eye of the Beholder” is actually a translation of a German play by the young playwright Marius von Mayenberg. It details the story of a young scientist who, one day, discovers everyone around him finds him despicably unattractive. So unattractive in fact that almost the entire first act is dedicated to his boss, co-worker and wife coming up with ever more imaginative ways to describe his ugliness. It’s a kind of perverse “dead parrot sketch”. After a radical procedure is performed he becomes a sex symbol extraodinaire (and was it just me or does Lette bear an uncanny resemblance to a certain shiny-skinned sallow young man with pointed teeth?). 

THE UGLY ONE has a lot to say about identity and issues of body image but never feels like the sort of instructional video HPE teachers are forced to show to increasingly disturbed teenagers. Instead the play is infused with a delightfully genuine sense of humour. The translation retains much of the German sensibility and affection for word play and the cast is superb.

Director Kat Henry has done a delightful job with a play that with everyone running this way and that sometimes verges a little too close to farce. Instead of pulling back she allows these moments to breath which gives the intimate moments more clarity and focus when she pulls the actors in close. It’s affecting and disconcerting. The script calls for the actors to play multiple roles and while this was initially confusing it eventually gives way to a much richer discussion on identity made more powerful because of the earlier confusion. The sparse and whitewashed set design allows the actors to pull focus and to create worlds as diverse and distant as a conference on electrical equipment in Switzerland (that gets surprisingly sexual) to a small surgery room to an elevator trip that would make Tyler Durden proud.

For all of its large scale concerns and “world issues” THE UGLY ONE is a personal story and the intimate setting reflects the intimacy of the story. It’s about each and everyone of us and our relationship with the man in the mirror.