Review: That Face

We could keep looking at That Face.


The publicity of a play is often useful. The posters often give away the style and theme of the play, the Facebook event offering snippets of what you are about to receive. It was Joanna Bowman’s choice to publicise That Face cryptically, giving nothing away by the eerily blank representation of the play’s title. After seeing the performance, it is clear why this is. Nothing could represent this play and the heart wrenching story of how an entanglement with one person can often lead to a dependency of another that is wholly unexpected. Much like the integral message of the play itself, this is not a cut and paste issue, one that can be summarised as a preview for an audience. After all, people spend their lives grappling with intense issues and emotions such as these, how can someone be expected to condense this into a snapshot of a family’s life?

The play began and again, little was given away. The first scene takes place in a boarding school, and depicts how boarding school life can often lead to circumstances far more grown up than the children within it. As Mia (Cate Kelly) later explains, boarding school is a different world, there are different rules. This sets the theme for the entire performance. In different situations there are different rules, whether this is within a family, a friendship, an amorous relationship, on a bed, in a school, across continents, and this is how people become tangled.

Later, we find ourselves transported into a dysfunctional family, focussing on the intimate relationship of Henry and Martha, son and mother, as they desperately try to keep each other from falling apart in the absence of Henry’s father and Martha’s ex-husband. This is an ambitious play, and it is testament to the cast that they flawlessly tackled heavy issues with such high emotion that I have never seen before in St Andrews. Particularly, Beth Robertson’s portrayal of Martha, the unfit mother first introduced as a manipulative alcoholic, should be commended for her ability to suck the audience in with charisma and wit that made her character intriguingly complex. This, coupled with the exceptional performance given by Fraser Craig, depicting a fractured human, worn away by the borderline obsessive relationship between son and mother made viewing at most times unbearable, but always engaging.

The staging of the play itself also added to its power. As the action accelerated into what can only be described as chaos, the simple set mingling with the sparsity of the Barron stage simply added to the impact of the integral message of the play. The decision to stage the final scene between Henry and Martha on the bed gave the entire production a beautiful symmetry that was almost symbolic of these two characters and their relationship.

It’s a reviewer’s place to assess the good of a production but also the bad, but when leaving the Barron on the night of the performance I was reluctant to focus on the bad. Sure, there was the occasional moment where the play’s strength was slightly detracted from by the usual performance slip ups, set changing being one of them, and the frequency in which the audience was left in the dark. However, with a play this moving, with actors this strong, and with a message that even now has disturbed me to the core, the few minor staging slip ups do not matter, this play was engaging, fascinating and perfect, in its own way.