Face to Face

What would Simon do next? As the busiest, highest flying young director/writer in Sydney this year, Simon Stone’s choice for the STC was unexpected. As Resident Director at the Belvoir, his back-to-back hits Strange Interlude and Death of a Salesman featured trademark updating and re-imagining of classic texts. Here he stages Face to Face, one of the most personal films of great Swedish director/writer Ingmar Bergman.

He and Andrew Upton have crafted their text from Bergman’s published screenplay, which was itself edited from over five hours of a 1976 TV mini-series that followed the crack-up and determined suicide attempt of Jenny, a seemingly capable psychiatrist. Played originally by the luminous Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s muse, Stone’s Jenny is the sturdier, more prosaic Kerry Fox, who virtually never leaves the wide expanses of the Sydney Theatre stage.

Pre-breakdown she roams the all-black space with just a little help from the odd pieces of rolled-in furniture that represent any change of venue. She must hold psychiatric sessions with her most disturbed patient either skating about on mobile chairs or crawling on the floor. Later, after steadfastly swallowing 50 nembutals, she half-wakes in the all-white hospital room that has descended from the flies. This amazing specimen-jar effect by designer Nick Schlieper, with a glass wall that separates Jenny from Life and from us, is particularly tough on Miss Fox who must play scenes of high stress and near madness distanced from her audience and via microphones.

The supporting cast, assisted by a choreographed unit of furniture wheelers, do their best with the plainly written inhabitants of Jenny’s crumbling life. Wendy Hughes and John Gaden register well as the aunt and uncle who adopted her as a young girl, and Queenie van de Zandt has some much needed fun with Jenny’s party-loving friend Elizabeth. There’s no doubting Simon Stone’s free-wheeling theatre talents but this latest production is an earthbound disappointment.

Frank Hatherley

Images: (top) Anna Martin and Kerry Fox, (middle) Humphrey Bower, Anna Martin and Dylan Young and (lower) full cast in Sydney Theatre Company’s Face to Face. Photographer: Brett Boardman.