Upstairs Downstairs: The Ugly One

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Reviews

4 stars Michael Billington, The Guardian, Friday 13th June

“Oh why,” asked Blake, “was I born with a different face? Why was I not born like the rest of my race?” But Marius von Mayenburg’s savage social satire, which kicks off a season of transfers from the Theatre Upstairs, highlights the dangers of living in a society with rigidly conformist notions of physical perfection.

What is astonishing is how much Mayenburg packs into 55 minutes. He starts with Lette, an industrial inventor, banned by his boss from attending a conference because of his ugly mug. When Lette’s wife confirms she loves him in spite of his looks, he takes himself to a plastic surgeon for a radical face-saving op. Transformed from Quasimodo to Adonis, he is an overnight star and finds everyone, including a 73-year-old female tycoon and her gay son, queueing to share his sexual favours. But nemesis arrives when the surgeon repeats the formula and, in a world filled with Lette lookalikes, the hero loses his unique identity.

Part of the play’s pleasure lies in its echoes. The god-like surgeon, boasting he can create or re-fashion humanity, evokes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. And it is hard to believe Mayenburg is unaware of Caryl Churchill’s A Number which raised similar questions about individuality. But Mayenburg is his own man; he uses Lette’s dubious physiognomy to explore the unacceptable face of capitalism. Not only do firms, he suggest, judge by appearances but we are all victims of a fashion-and-media nexus which banishes the odd and unsightly. You only to have to scan the glossies with their parade of the beautiful people to realise his point.

Admittedly you wonder why it has taken so long for everyone, including Lette’s workmates and wife, to point out his peculiarity. But Mayenburg develops his argument with blackly comic logic leading to the conclusion that we would all sacrifice our selfhood in order to gaze narcissistically at our doubles.
He is much aided by Maja Zade’s deft translation, and Ramin Gray’s dazzling production which offsets the play formal perfection by creating a rough-and-ready, rehearsal-room ambience.

Four actors play seven roles, deliberately obscuring the differences between them. The wittily sensual Amanda Drew switches in a second from Lette’s wife to his septuagenarian mistress. Simon Paisley Day effectively wields both the scalpel and the axe as surgeon and boss, and Frank McCusker slyly shifts from business-rival to amorous pursuer. Only Michael Gould as Lette occupies a single role; but even he, in moving to beauty from the beast, underscores Mayenburg’s point that we inhabit a modern vanity fair where identity is up for grabs. 5 stars Lucy Powell, Time Out, Monday 16th June

Critics Choice

Lette is hideous to look at. Preternaturally, catastrophically ugly. A fact he only discovers when his boss refuses to let him promote his 2CK electrical connector at a conference. You’re a beautiful human being, his wife says, before admitting that even she can’t bear to look at him. He consequently submits to the surgeon’s knife, emerging with the most beautiful face imaginable, only to find his world imploding, piece by piece in consequence.

Marius von Mayenburg’s searing, absurdist satire is impeccably served in Ramin Gray’s pared-down production, which first opened Upstairs at the Royal Court last year. The internecine questions he poses about superficiality and consumerism, identity and selfhood are lent scorching intensity by the fact that none of the actors is in costume, there isn’t a set and they inhabit and discard their characters at will. In Lette’s world, you are only what you appear to be. On Gray’s stage, you are whatever you enact. He draws superlative performances from the four-strong cast: Amanda Drew is chillingly effective as Lette’s bemused wife, an icy surgeon’s assistant and a 73-year-old tycoon with a fetish for face-lifts, all called Fanny. The Schefflers (boss and surgeon) are brought to coolly comic life by a supercilious Simon Paisley Day and Michael Gould’s Lette is a show stealer: hilarious, moving and beguiling by turns.

Von Mayenburg’s scenario runs slightly out of steam before the 55 minutes of its running time are up. Once Lette’s bought his flawless physical perfection, his moral decay is pretty predictable and unemotive, and in its final, excessive stages, this begins to feel like a one-trick pony of a play. It is, however, undeniably an extraordinarily clever, satirically excoriating trick, stupendously realised on the Royal Court’s bare stage. 4 stars Nicholas de Jongh,Evening Standard, Friday 13th June

The cult of Narcissus, as Marius von Mayenburg’s entrancing, black satire on human individuality reminds us, is taken far more seriously than religious belief these days. Inspired by our reverence for cosmetic surgery, Botox and miracle creams as accessories to help us become perfectly beautiful, The Ugly One imagines a future in which face transplants become the natural thing.

For 55 minutes of inventive comedy, von Mayenberg leads us through the phases of a nightmare to an unnatural conclusion: the play culminates in a new World Order where everyone is identically beautiful and people no longer communicate. Like Narcissus, they have become self-dazzled, caught in self-adorations irresistible grip. As one says, in a scathing parody of the language of love, to another who has eyes and mind for himself alone: I cant live without me. Id die if I lost me.

Promoted to the Court’s main stage from its Theatre Upstairs, where it premiered last September, The Ugly One casts its unsettling spell once again. Director Ramin Gray has retained the improvisatory, rehearsal-like quality of his original production in which even the face-transplant operations are mimed and actors sit around on benches.

In accordance with the script’s dream-laden mood, there are no scene locations or scene changes and minimal action. As if in a premonition of what will happen to characters in The Ugly One, several of them share the same name and all speak with a disconcertingly comic, zombie-like simplicity.

The plot hinges upon the discovery of Michael Gould’s Lette, someone big in an electronics firm, that his ugliness makes him an ineffective salesman. The surgeon, a cavalier Simon Paisley Day, gives him a face transplant that launches a score of admirers in hot pursuit, the amusing best of them, a face-lifted septuagenarian and her gay son.

It is von Mayenburg’s brilliant, deflationary conceit that the proud surgeon clones the lovely Lette face-transplant. The beautified Ugly One sees himself everywhere. That world of stereotype Narcissuses is summoned in the chilling finale. 4 stars Sam Marlowe, Times, Saturday 14th June

Watching The Ugly One is a bit like reading a really good science-fiction short story. It monkeys with your preconceptions, making the obscure obvious and the obvious newly negotiable. Does it touch the heart strings? It doesnt even look at them. But Marius von Mayenburg’s hour-long satire, promoted downstairs after a run in the studio theatre last autumn, is an exciting experiment in questioning our search for physical perfection.

Lette is an inventor, puzzled when his boss Schleffer refuses to let him promote his new device, the High Voltage Conductor. The reason becomes clear: Your face is unacceptable, he is told. You can’t sell anything with that face. Is Lette ugly? Michael Gould, the actor who plays him, is not. The director, Ramin Gray, has staged events with minimal decoration: his four cast members sit on banquettes and a swivel chair. So physical appearances are left to the imagination. We know Lette is a horror because everyone says so, his wife included: I thought you knew, she says. I’ve always admired you for coping so well. So a pioneering plastic surgeon transforms him into a vision of perfection. His career explodes. His wife, Fanny, loves what she sees. So do other women, 25 of whom become his lovers. This plastic man pulls a rich and sexed-up plastic pensioner and her gay son, who also has designs on him. Is there such a thing as having too beautiful a face? Only when everyone else gets the surgeon to give them that face too.

Von Mayenburg’s story moves along like a warp-speed Pygmalion. It’s often thrilling, seeing one idea morph into the next without so many of the customary building blocks of drama; the hellos, goodbyes, can-I-get-you-a-drinks that are there to convince rather than provoke.

Amanda Drew lets you know that she has switched from Lette’s lubricious young wife to a lubricious 72-year-old with a swish of her hair. Frank McCusker trusts his stillness and the lean, witty lines (translated from the German by Maja Zade) to convince us that he has been given new faces as both Lette’s resentful assistant and the gay son.

If you’re interested in theatrical storytelling, see this show. But you may also come up against the limits of such a lean aesthetic. We can understand Lette’s situation, but the brittle, flab-free wit, and a staging that’s somewhere between art installation and radio play, makes this a stimulating but cool experience. It has done its job, its brilliant job, by about the half-hour mark. By the time Lette is conversing with his face or is it really his, hmm? in the mirror, the ideas-to-credibility ratio is out of whack, and its a Charlie Kaufman film without a pulse.

What will this playwright do next? Ideally add a wee bit of sustaining warmth to his exciting cynicism. But, though it has the odd blemish, The Ugly One will stay in the brain far longer than many other perfectly formed plays.

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