Media mimicry

If women follow the advice contained in popular glossy magazines, success in all areas of life should be guaranteed. After all, the tireless editors and journalists scour the globe for the latest tips, techniques and trends on health, beauty, business, relationships, sex, money, food, fashion, nutrition and sometimes, even art.

This army of resolute reporters track down experts on all subjects pertaining to women’s interests and through the use of charm, wit and intelligence manage to extract the knowledge these gurus have obtained from lifetimes of specialisation and distill it into manageable, accessible sentences and soundbites we can easily absorb while having our nails manicured or waiting for our perfect pavlova to bake after whipping up a nutritious meal (with the help of our go-getting lover/husband of course) for a family of three-point-two.

So surely, slavishly applying all this information in the management of our lives should result in wealth, beauty, style, regular orgasms and responsible procreation.

But as Hayleigh Evans, acting as editor Lesley, states in the opening scene of Unfair Lady, it doesn’t work, does it? Although we always have hope.

Of course, women’s magazines are ripe pickings for parody and writer Gwydion Beynon rips into this rich vein by penning a number of scenes which mimick the false promise of the cover headlines on any glossy women’s monthly on the supermarket shelves and Evans and Rachel Neary let it bleed onto stage.

Given the masses of material he has at hand, combined with Orly Shapiro’s deft direction of Neary’s natural ability for comedy and Evans’s deliberately self-deprecating desperation, the play is lined with laughs. Pity there’s mostly fluff to be found inside that lining.

There are one or two scenes that tease at deeper layers, particularly ‘Jenny’s unlived life’ which involves Evans acting the part of the mother of a child suffering leukemia who shifts her concern onto the social media campaign based on Jenny’s illness rather than being concerned about her daughter. It is this scene, perfectly pitched and played, which saves Unfair Lady from being little more than a neat and pretty package in which Neary and Evans clown in shallow parody for cheap laughs.

In Jenny’s unlived life Beynon shifts to devastating satire that puts our contemporary narcissim and misplaced concerns under a bare bulb in a room in which we all squirm uncomfortably in various measures of complicity. ‘Black is the new black’ was next best in its satirical mix of fashion and racial obsession in which black and white are guilty.

Everything else I recall, barring the editor’s opening address, was just an inversion of what we see in the glossies, a mimicry rather than a criticism of the ideology driving the material they invert.

A more forgiving view, being festive season, is that this Jo’burg team from the innovative POPArt theatre situated in Jeppestown have simply provided a pleasant present. Professionally mixed and artfully presented, a cocktail with enough booze for the wooze but not too much to burst our happy bubble.

Personally, I like my hard tack undiluted.

Unfair Lady is on at the Alexander Upstairs theatre until Saturday 12 December.Book here.

— Steve Kretzmann