The Ugly One ( Archived )

Reviews

Caroline McGinn, 24th September 2007, TIME OUT

The Ugly One

The neo-cons may have the money and the guns, but its the body-cons who have the look, and in our narcissistic culture, looks matter more than almost anything else. Marius von Mayenburg’s laid-back dystopian comedy cuts to the quick of the question of whether identity is more than skin-deep. Inventor Lette (Michael Gould) is the Ugly One of the title. His face is so unspeakably ugly that no-one, not even his wife Fanny, has ever dared mention it. But his blissful ignorance ends on the day his boss refuses to let him front his new gizmo – a gloriously brain-numbing metaphor for technological progress called the 2CK plug connector.

One freakishly successful face-transplant later and its clear that no one in this auditorium really knows who they are. Ramin Gray’s nonchalant scratch-style production shades the characters into the actors and the actors into the audience the four onstage sit about on chairs taking turns to speak while a prompter flicks through a ring-bound script in the corner. Von Mayenburg’s script stipulates doubled parts. So Amanda Drew’s casually devastating Fanny shades into the sexually rapacious septuagenarian face-lift addict Mrs Fanny (who seduces the newly Adonis-faced Lette with her companys millions). Mark Lockyer gently oozes opportunism as Lettes boss and his surgeon. And Frank McCusker brings plaintive irony to two Karlmanns, Lette’s plug-tester and Mrs Fanny’s tortured, gay son.

Von Mayenburg’s off-beam wit and sharp-tongued dialogue sit well in this casual staging, which deconstructs the script’s deconstruction of identity almost as neatly as Scheffler reconstructs Lette’s face. As it slices further away from the sometimes poignant exposure of the initial characters and into the satirical fantasy/farce of their doubles, it loses heart but gains face. And Goulds face, of course, remains the same throughout, a perpetually embodied reminder that both beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the collective beholder.

Paul Taylor, 19 September 2007, The Independent

Extravagant ugliness that is transformed into a drop-dead gorgeous play

I must say that I felt glad, as I was watching Marius von Mayenburg’s brilliantly clever and funny new play, that I am not one of those critics who have a picture by-line. One might be exposed to ironic titters with one’s face sitting atop a review of a drama like ‘The Ugly One’ which centres on a research scientist and inventor called Lette (Michael Gould) who is so extravagantly ugly that even his wife can only look him in the eye and not in the full face.

It was never clear to me how he had managed to go through life to early middle age without registering the full extent of his hideousness. But it’s eventually brought home to him when the company for whom he has developed a new kind of electrical plug decide to send someone else to a business convention to talk about it, since, with his looks, Lette would be a commercial liability. So he turns to a plastic surgeon who refashions his visage and, by a stroke of luck, leaves him with a uniquely drop-dead gorgeous status. Women, including a 73-year-old head of a company who has herself been nicked and tucked to a semblance of youth, queue for his favours. Then, there is a dramatic and tragi-comic twist that multiplies the problem of being him and gives a whole new meaning to the idea of having features to die for.

Von Mayenberg’s play reacts with a devilishly cunning flair and originality to a world in which more and more people are aspiring to generic templates of beauty. Switch on an American news channel and virtually all anchor-women are Barbies. Even someone as supremely gifted and individual as Rufus Wainwright was heard to say in a recent interview that he regretted not looking like a porn star and he was only being partly ironic from the sound of it.

The play reminded me at times of Caryl Churchill’s supremely great ‘A Number’, not just in its artful consideration of questions of identity in an age of replication (here through cosmetic surgery rather than cloning Lette becomes the face that launches a thousand face-lifts), but through the daring of its technique.

Puckishly suiting the subject, actors pose as look-alikes in the space of a line of dialogue or flit to-and-fro between identities in a twinkling. Running at 55 minutes, the play is splendidly served by the talented cast (Amanda Drew, Michael Gould, Mark Lockyer and Frank McCusker), a translation by Maja Zade that often has the bounce and snap of music-hall cross-talk and a very canny production by Ramin Gray that gives the piece a non-realistic rehearsal room setting that makes it feel like a thought-experiment that has gone scarily wrong. An exhilarating start to the Royal Court’s International Season.

Nicholas de Jongh, 19th September 2007, Evening Standard

A handsome look at ugliness

It is an existential nightmare about beauty and the precarious ego, a delectable black comedy envisaging a fearful future role for cosmetic surgery and a parabolic satire mocking our conviction that the good-looking have all the sex, power and happiness. I have not seen a more imaginative, inventive or disturbing theatrical vision of the future than the Ugly One by the German playwright Marius von Mayenburg. It runs just 55 minutes but will linger in my mind for ages.

Von Mayenburg’s big idea is to imagine what happens when Michael Gould’s bland Lette, the ugly one of the title and the inventor of something-called “the patented 2CK connector”, discovers he is forbidden to present this new discovery to the waiting business world.

“Your face is unacceptable,” his boss, Scheffler (charismatic Mark Lockyer) tells him, or as his wife Amanda Drew’s serene Fanny puts it, breaking the secret of a polite marriage: “You’re unspeakably ugly.”

The scene of nonchalant, taboobreaking rudeness works a comic treat. What more natural, then, than that Lette should ask the Surgeon, also called Scheffler and played by a more sinister Lockyer, to give him a fresh face? Equipped with admired new features, he duly finds himself the company’s favoured salesman.

Yet happiness is not won on the basis of superficial beauty. Lette soon discovers he has become a clone about town, since his proud surgeon is offering the imprint of his face to others. The eerily amusing penultimate scene, in which Lette finds himself face to face with himself, in the transformed shape of the gay son of his elderly female lover, marks narcissism’s triumph and the disintegration of the human personality.

Von Mayenburg looks to a future world packed with stereotypes, all individualism gone. As if in anticipation of this homogeneous society, seven characters share four names.

Ramin Gray’s stylised, elegantly acted production adopts the studied air of a rehearsed reading, its characters ranged around in the rectangular frame of Jeremy Herbert’s set. The author gives no clue as to where anything happens and no scene changes are registered either, so Gray’s insistence upon monochromic neutrality reflects The Ugly One’s provocative bleakness.

Sam Marlowe, 21st September 2007, The Times

The Ugly One

Lette is hideous. In fact, with horrible aptness, considering that he works for a company that has just developed a revolutionary new socket fixture, he is plug-ugly. Thats the opinion of his boss, Scheffler, who, thanks to Lettes off-putting looks, asks his assistant, Karlmann, to present Lettes invention to the business community. Its also the view of his wife, Fanny, who admits that while she thinks him a beautiful human being she finds him physically repellent. So Lette, perturbed by these revelations, submits to the surgeons knife. He emerges from his bandages irresistibly beautiful but at what cost?

This 55-minute scalpel-slash of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg, briskly translated by Maja Zade, is a viciously comic assault on the warped values of pop-culture-fed modern society. Appearance is everything, and surgery is a matter of almost thoughtless choice in the greedy pursuit of contentment if it makes you happy, as Lettes wife casually puts it. With everyone assigned a role spouse, boss, worker theres little room for honesty or individuality; especially when Lettes new face become the visage du jour, and the streets fill up with lookalikes, freshly unpeeled from their bandages.

Its a distorted but frighteningly sharp mirror image of our celebrity and youth-obsessed world. Aspiration to a commercially prescribed notion of beauty has begun to obliterate identity, and Nicole Kidmans nose is a cosmetic-surgery commodity.

Lette is a kind of 21st-century Elephant Man, exploited by his employer, his surgeon and by the men and women who are suddenly wildly keen to have sex with him. All von Mayenburgs characters aside from Lette are called Fanny, Scheffler or Karlmann, emphasising the blurring of identities. The actors glide fluidly between roles, so that Lettes wife Fanny is swiftly transformed into a septuagenarian, also called Fanny, whose extensive surgery permits her to present herself as a youthful vamp.

Ramin Grays stripped-back production, in Jeremy Herberts scruffy rehearsal room-style setting, emphasises the works preoccupation with role-playing, and it is acted with razor wit by Amanda Drew, Michael Gould, Mark Lockyer and Frank McCusker. Perversely, the whole is somewhat bloodless a swift stab from a chilly blade when a lengthier dissection would have yielded more political and dramatic interest. But, brief as it is, its coolly clever and nastily arresting.

Michael Billington, 19th September 2007, The Guardian

The Ugly One

What is human identity? Is it changed by cosmetic surgery or cellular experiments? Questions posed by Caryl Churchill in A Number recur in Marius von Mayenburg’s play which kicks off the Court’s international season; but, far from being a theatrical clone, this is a witty social satire which asserts its independent existence.

Lette, the hero, is so phenomenally ugly that he is forbidden by his firm to promote his latest industrial invention. So he goes to a surgeon who gives him an Adonis-like face which makes him sexually irresistible to his wife, female fans on the lecture circuit and even a 73-year-old corporate boss and her gay son. Exhilaration, however, gives way to despair when the surgeon repeats the operation on others and the world is suddenly filled with Lette lookalikes.

Owing glancing debts to Mary Shelley and HG Wells, Mayenburg’s 60-minute play squarely hits any number of targets: our society’s obsession with external beauty, the brutality of capitalism, and the danger of treating defining organs like mechanical parts. But, deftly translated from German by Maja Zade, the play makes its points with the lightest of touches. Even the fact that four actors play seven parts without any physical alteration confirms Mayenburg’s idea that our individality is threatened by a creeping conformism.

And Ramin Gray’s Theatre Upstairs production inspires delicious performances from Michael Gould as the transformed Lette, Amanda Drew as his wife and face-lifted lover, Mark Lockyer as his vindictive employer and surgical exploiter and Frank McCusker as his envious deputy and inverted admirer. The result is a small but perfectly formed play.

Aleks Sierz, 20 September 2007, The Stage

The Ugly One

Is ugliness more than skin deep? In our society, when everyone is judged by how they appear, being ugly is career suicide. German playwright Marius von Mayenburg takes this idea and runs with it, developing a series of rapid scenarios in which Lette, an innovative engineer, finds his prospects are compromised by his unsightly appearance.

But, when he tries plastic surgery, the result is that his beautiful new face gets him into as much trouble as his old one. Von Mayenburgs satire is short and sharp, and hits all its targets – our obsession with appearances, definitions of beauty and the culture of celebrity – with unerring precision.

Like his British influences, namely Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, von Mayenburg tells this humorous, yet astringent, parable with immense theatrical verve – four actors play eight parts and there are no scene swaps or costume changes so the story moves forward at a cracking pace.

Ramin Grays superb production, with excellent translation by Maja Zade, uses a bare set and challenges the actors to make the texts rapid shifts in perspective comprehensible. Without recourse to make-up, Michael Goulds Lette is both ugly and beautiful, and Amanda Drew, Mark Lockyer and Frank McCusker play all the other characters with utter conviction.

As the first in the Royal Courts International Season, The Ugly One is an imaginative and mind expanding piece of theatre, and a direct challenge to British playwrights to cast off their habitual shackles of literal naturalism and social realism, and to imagine a more daring type of drama.

Charles Spencer, 20th September 2007, The Daily Telegraph

Bloodless satire of plastic surgery

Back in the 1990s, the Royal Court became notorious for so-called “in-yer-face” theatre, in which scum-of-the-earth characters indulged in graphic acts of violence and sex.

The theatre’s new artistic director, Dominic Cooke, is chary of such cultural tourism, however, and has promised plays that will reflect back the concerns of his predominantly middle-class audience.

To this end he is now offering what might be described as “about-yer-face” theatre.

Many of the denizens of SW1, particularly those women of a certain age who lunch on a lettuce leaf before a strenuous afternoon’s shopping in Sloane Street, are no strangers to cosmetic surgery.

And in the German dramatist Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, Cooke has discovered the perfect cautionary tale for them.

Our hero, Lette, is the hotshot inventor of an amazing new electrical plug. But he is devastated to discover that he won’t be allowed to deliver the presentation at a sales convention because he is so appallingly ugly.

The poor chap has never realised this before, but his wife confirms his boss’s verdict. “You’ve always been a beautiful human being, but you are very, very ugly,” she tells him sadly.

Lette decides to put himself under the knife, and the operation proves a stunning success. The ugly brute is turned into an object of sublime and irresistible beauty, everyone fancies him, and his career prospers.

But this being a fable and, moreover, a German fable there is a nasty sting in the tale. The surgeon begins to perform the operation on others, so Lette keeps seeing people who look just like him.

Neglected by her husband, Lette’s wife has an affair with one of the clones. And then our hero undergoes a full-blown identity crisis.

It’s an intriguing and often wittily presented scenario (lasting less than an hour) that neatly captures the superficial values of an age in which appearance often seems more important than substance.

Nevertheless, there is a touch of timidity about it. By and large it is women who go under the surgeon’s knife for vanity’s sake, not men, and von Mayenburg ducks the fact.

His characters are also disappointingly bloodless and one-dimensional, and, like so much “absurdist” theatre, the piece ultimately feels mechanical.

I also found myself impatient with Ramin Gray’s production, with the stage manager in open view, the actors in street clothes, and a static lighting plot, as if we were watching a run-through rather than a finished production.

The doubling and tripling of roles is tiresome, too, and while I can see the dramatist is making a point by insisting that Lette should look exactly the same before and after the op, the small boy inside me wished there had been some spectacular prosthetic effects.

Michael Gould (whose face looks comfortably lived-in rather than ugly) memorably captures his character’s journey from despair to Narcissus-like self-love, and there is strong support from Mark Lockyer as the suave surgeon and the deliciously mischievous Amanda Drew in all the female roles.

But clever though it is, The Ugly One’s attraction is only skin-deep.

Kate Bassett, 23rd September 2007, Independent on Sunday

The good, the bad and the ugly: a social satire

Lette has assumed, until now, that he looks okay. However, to everyone else in Marius von Mayenburg’s darkly comic teaser about identity, plastic surgery and marketing, he is The Ugly One.

The Royal Court’s International Playwrights season gets off to a strong start with this satiric-going-on-surreal chamber piece for four actors.

Michael Gould’s Lette (actually looking quite ordinary) is a happy employee in an electronics firm until he is told by his boss Mark Lockyer’s commercially hardnosed Scheffler that he’s no eye-candy so can’t present his own invention (a high-voltage connector plug) at a business convention. His wife, Fanny (Amanda Drew), then breezily confirms that, although a lovely person, he is unspeakably hideous.

After having his face refashioned from scratch by a surgeon (Lockyer’s second role), Lette emerges looking like a million dollars (or so we glean, while Gould’s face remains unchanged). Jaws drop in astonishment and Lette becomes a hot property at work and with the ladies. However, this goes to his head and corrodes any firm sense of identity especially as the surgeon starts nightmarishly mass-producing lucrative Lette clones.

The director, Ramin Gray, has created a production which is more fascinating for not being tarted up. This is bare-bones theatre, resembling a rehearsal with no costumes or props except for one blue plastic bag which is slipped over post-op heads as a pretend bandage. The acting is excellent, deadpan and downplayed, the effect of which is, at once, dryly humorous and unnervingly frosty. Gray’s cast simply deliver their lines sitting around on benches. Yet their role-changing becomes mind-bending as the characters proliferate and keep sharing names.

For example, in the blink of an eye, Drew can be Lette’s wife then his mistress another Fanny who, we are told, is 73 but has also been insanely enhanced under the scalpel. Meanwhile, Frank McCusker doubles as Lette’s professional rival, Karlmann, and the mistress’s bisexual son also called Karlmann who becomes voyeuristically enamoured of Lette. Both Karlmanns proceed to acquire his face and he ultimately falls in love with one of them, as if narcissistically transfixed by his own mirror image.

Von Mayenburg’s German sense of humour perhaps loses something in translation. His monologues, sending up dull sales pitches, are a drag. The closing plot twists are slightly strained too. Nonetheless, this piece is being cleverly paired with Rhinoceros, Eugene Ionesco’s play where people morph into monstrous pachyderms (currently previewing in the Theatre Downstairs). The Ugly One also echoes Ovid’s Pygmalion, Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s twin-blurring Twelfth Night and other classic stories all with a sharp contemporary twist.

The comedy becomes stealthily disturbing, touching on raw, instinctive worries and philosophical questions about our current society’s shallow values and its foolish ditching of plain, honest realities in favour of manufactured fantasies.

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