Since the savvy Anne-Louise Sarks took on the mantle of Melbourne Theatre Company’s Artistic Director, the company has enjoyed a stellar run, embracing a richer diversity of voices to offer works with depth and breadth.
Highlights include Sarks’ reenvisioning of A Streetcar Named Desire; Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant’s cracking adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brillant Career, the best new musical in an age; Andrea James’ spot-on The Black Woman of Gippsland; Benjamin Law’s loving tribute to his late mate, Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir; and director Bert LaBonté’s one-two punch of Topdog/Underdog and Retrograde.
Sadly, the first real turkey of Sarks’ time at the top – Losing Face, by television writer Marieke Hardy – arrives severely undercooked and in danger of giving audiences the runs (to the exit).
Losing Face review – quick links
Shallow backstories
Hardy enjoyed stage success with her rapturously received cost-of-living crisis comedy, No Pay? No Way! But it was an adaptation of Italian playwrights’ Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Nobel Prize-winning Sotto Paga! Non Si Paga!
Losing Face, an original work far from deserving of that adjective, is, in comparison, derivative, flat and thoroughly uninspired. If you’re going to promise a ‘perimenopausal Weekend at Bernie’s’ then you better deliver more than precisely one laugh-out-loud moment in a laborious hour-and-45 minutes of stale reheats.
That moment is, admittedly, a rip-roaring sight gag involving the signage of a certain Mexican fast-food joint that speaks to wistful memories of youthful drunken misadventures on holiday. Sadly, that’s the show’s only sign of clear purpose.
The basic set-up is ripped right out of the glut of TV shows based on high-end wellness retreats and snake oil peddlers. Stuff like Wellmania, Apple Cider Vinegar and Nine Perfect Strangers with a hint of White Lotus. But Hardy’s read on the genre is a muddled mess.
Boy Swallows Universe star Michala Banas plays Jo, a travel writer co-opting a review of a ritzy Byron resort, the Royal You, as her all-expenses-paid 50th birthday retreat. She invites besties Simone (Deadloch lead Madeleine Sami) and Lauren (Kimbelry Akimbo’s Christie Whelan Browne) but don’t expect to learn much about who they are, in a play that feels as bloated as botoxed lips yet clinically uninterested in character. All three backstories remain hazy to the point of near non-existence.
Jo’s a cipher. Simone’s identity mostly hinges on being an older lesbian engaged to a much younger woman, a fact she’s secretly self-conscious about. This engagement greatly irks Lauren, a harried mum of twins who has moved to the country and fallen out of touch.
While their reunion, pierced by their signature birdcall ‘ca-ca’, is meant to be about rest and relaxation, cocktails and facials, the tension simmering between Simone and Lauren signals that all will not go wellness.
Shameful caricatures
A quick segue on what does really work in Losing Face: Jo Briscoe’s costumes for the three mates, particularly Lauren’s much-maligned Gorman vibe, and the designer’s impressive set, bringing both the intimate lighting of a five-star bedroom and the big blue sky that spans the grassy knoll above the hotel.
Gifted director Leticia Cáceres does her best to inject vitality through near-constant movement. She shifts the buddies from the foyer to the bedroom, to treatment rooms and out to a raised ice bath with the aid of Briscoe’s revolve.
But Cáceres can only do so much, fatally hamstrung by the wooliness of Hardy’s words, as sludgy as the snail mucus treatments offered at the Royal You. If the central trio are vague placeholders in dire need of a rewrite, with Hardy’s flood of period and menopause jokes feeling flat-out stolen from far better shows, the retreat staff fare far worse.
It is astoundingly shameful that Hardy thinks it’s still ok to try and wring cheap and nasty laughs out of ‘foreign’ accents, saddling the sparkling Wil King with a bigoted South African caricature, as the Royal You’s shyster guru, Tomas. There should be no place for stunts like this at the MTC.
Awful accent aside, Tomas is an even less focused character. There should be a menacing sting to this nefarious plastic surgery-pushing meanie, cajoling the friends into butt lifts, tummy tucks and lip filler under the guise of self-actualisation.
But Tomas is played more like a Ken doll-like jester, inexplicably cartwheeling in lieu of characterisation, with nary a sign of manipulative power. That physical whimsy is a poor choice on the part of Cáceres, but it’s also a clear sign of Hardy’s inability to address the issue at hand: the morass of magazine and Instagram-led capitalistic misogyny that belligerently buries women under the weight of unrealistic expectations.
Watch the trailer
Tone deaf
If Tomas is a failed antagonist, then Dying: A Memoir’s Genevieve Morris is the hardest done by in a desultory dual role. She plays Tomas’ flunky, a nurse who is just following orders to secure her own makeover at any cost.
Her sneering judgement of the besties could have been a pithy puncturing of the crumb maidens who throw other women under the bus in the course of their slavish adulation of bad men. But Hardy’s scattershot plot even stuffs this up, with a late and exceedingly silly twist on the nurse’s true identity making not a lick of sense, kicking out what scant satirical scaffolding exists here.
Morris also plays a Tanya McQuoid-adjacent, Briiiiiiiighton-like regular guest of the Royal You, showing early promise as a snooty foil to Jo, Simone and Lauren. But the play forgets she exists for most of its torturous duration, only resurfacing for a fall-flat dud of a final ‘joke’ that jars.
It’s no fault of the cast that Losing Face sucks like lipo. Whelan Browne and Sami in particular work overtime to lift it up, but their poorly served by Hardy and a play that doesn’t appear to know what it wants to be or say.
The tonal shifts between slapdash farce and mercenary tearjerker crash like the friends after one wild night way beyond their glory days. Even within the play’s blurrily heightened reality, the ease with which the mates move on from a tragedy isn’t believable, with Hardy labouring the running line, ‘That didn’t happen’.
Losing Face’s wit needed to be as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, or at least embrace dumb fun. Instead, it’s a boring chore with most of the heavy lifting outsourced to tired pop culture references. You’d be better off watching Bridget Christie’s vastly superior The Change over at SBS, which channels the spirit that’s DOA here.
