Biography Of My Skin

Downstage Theatre, Wellington

09/04/2010 - 24/04/2010

Downstage Theatre, Wellington

09/10/2009 - 31/10/2009

Concert Chamber - Town Hall, THE EDGE, Auckland

21/09/2010 - 25/09/2010

Production Details

Written by: Stuart McKenzie
Directed by: Tim Spite

Miranda Harcourt returns to Downstage with a new solo show

Biography of My Skin takes a life lived on stage and looks for the truth behind the face-paint. In this candid, autobiographical solo show, actor Miranda Harcourt sets out to tell her story as a working mother.

But there’s a catch. The script is written by Miranda’s husband Stuart McKenzie (True, Double Beat). The more she struggles to talk about her relationships, ambitions and marriage, the more interference she experiences from the writer seeking to husband her narrative.

This funny and often outrageous conflict between husband and wife – in all its skirmishes, subterfuges and dramatics – reveals a surprisingly moving portrait of a marriage, as well as an entertaining social history of the last four decades.

Biography of My Skin is the long-awaited follow-up to Flowers from My Mother’s Garden, which toured throughout NZ and was seen by over 35,000 people.

“Flowers From My Mother’s Garden shares the experiences of a mother, daughter and extended family with an ingenious simplicity that belies the depth of insight. It’s a prime example of how universal the particular can be …That’s what I call communication!”
John Smythe, National Business Review

Stuart and Miranda have worked extensively with verbatim text since the groundbreaking solo shows Verbatim (written by William Brandt, co-devised by Miranda and William) and Portraits (written with Stuart). And also their feature film For Good, which developed out of Portraits.

Pursuing their interest in “real lives, real voices” Miranda and Stuart turned their lens onto their own family. Their short film Voiceover (Best Short Film, NZ Film and TV Awards) recounts an episode from the life of Miranda’s late father Peter Harcourt. And Flowers From My Mothers Garden (commissioned by the NZ Festival of the Arts) played out the changing relationship between a mother and daughter.

Biography of My Skin puts marriage under the microscope. In fact, the play uses the tussle between the actor and the writer to get under the skin of marriage and family life. In so doing, it pulls apart the very idea of the solo show.

Biography of My Skin is a rare opportunity to see Miranda return to the Wellington stage after 5 years.

Miranda and Stuart are joined by an outstanding team, including lighting designer Paul O’Brien (Flowers from My Mother’s Garden and Double Beat), set designer Andrew Foster (Blood Wedding, The Raft) and Robert Larsen as audio-visual designer (Apollo 13). Director Tim Spite (Turbine, Paua) brings his unique vision through his company Seeyd which has created some of the most startling theatre of recent years.

Biography of My Skin
Dates: 9-31 OCT 2009
Times: 6:30pm Tue-Wed and 8pm Thu-Sat.
Prices: $25 to $45.
Meet the Artists: Tue 8 OCT 2009
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So poignant, so real, so fricken beautiful

Miranda Harcourt’s Biography of My Skin returns to Downstage

Written by Stuart McKenzie, Miranda Harcourt’s Biography of My Skin is a moving and laugh-out-loud journey of love, marriage and growing up. What starts as a ‘solo show’ is soon anything but, as people from Miranda’s life appear to tell their side of the story.

When Miranda tries to rewrite the script, the writer/actor, husband/wife conflict escalates to reveal a surprisingly moving portrait of a marriage.

Set against a soundtrack of The Police, Jesus and Mary Chain and Straitjacket Fits; and a backdrop of Gloss, Princess Diana’s visit to New Zealand and the 1981 Springbok Tour, Biography of My Skin traces the role of a lifetime through four decades we’ll never forget.

The 2009 premiere season of Biography of My Skin prompted the quote from one audience member that has become the slogan for the entire season at Downstage:

“We love Downstage for presenting outstanding kiwi drama like Biography of My Skin. Lizzie and I laughed and cried. So poignant, so real, so fricken beautiful!”
Al Brown – Chef, fisherman, TV presenter & food writer

Nominated for Best Script (Stuart McKenzie) and winner of two Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards in 2009: Outstanding Performance (Miranda Harcourt) and Best Director (Tim Spite).

Biography of My Skin – return season
9-27 April 2010
Preview: 8 April
Times: Tue-Wed 6:30pm, Thur-Sat 8pm
Prices: $45-$25, see www.downstage.co.nz for detailed pricing
Matinee: Sat 17 Apr @ 4pm
Meet the Artists: Tue 13 Apr 2010

Tickets can be purchased online, by phone at (04) 801 6946 or in person at Downstage’s box office. For up-to-date information visit www.downstage.co.nz
Downstage is proudly sponsored by BNZ.

AUCKLAND SEASON
Presented in association with STAMP at THE EDGE

Biography Of My Skin plays
September 21^st – 25^th

Tuesday and Wednesday @7pm. Thursday – Saturday @8pm. Saturday Matinee 2.30pm

Concert Chamber, Auckland Town Hall, THE EDGE

Tickets: $39.90 full and $34.90 concession (Service fees apply)

Bookings through THE EDGE: www.buytickets.co.nz or 0800 BUY TICKETS.

WITH:
Miranda Harcourt

Theatre , Solo ,

Review by Janet McAllister 23rd Sep 2010

Review by Nik Smythe 22nd Sep 2010

The cinematic titles on the large rear-wall screen indicate the start of the show. Then the large on-screen smiling face of local celebrity Miranda Harcourt gets straight into the title theme, relaying her tumultuous battle with problem skin, only to be interrupted by her real-life self charging in late for her own play.

This odd scenario perfectly sets us up for almost two hours of anything-goes style theatre. Breaking the fourth wall has long transcended its radical origins to become a familiar convention, but in the course of telling their very personal stories between them Harcourt and her husband and playwright Stuart McKenzie manage to ‘break’ all four walls, plus the fire exit and a large onstage chest full of costumes and props.

Biography of my Skin marks the third installment of a biographical family trilogy after the short film Voiceover explored the early career of Miranda’s father, veteran broadcaster Peter Harcourt, and the 1998 play Flowers From My Mother’s Garden, also written by Stuart about (and performed by) Miranda with her mother Dame Kate Harcourt. I haven’t had the fortune to watch either of the preceding works; fortunately this remarkable work stands alone.

It’s quite a feat to utilise the potentially glib devices such as interacting with the projections of herself, her friends and family and some endearing character ‘re-enactments’ played by director Tim Spite and others, without it coming across as simply that – glib, clever but trite amusement, a diversion rather than a means to take the story deeper. Yet this is what has been achieved: a strong, affecting, honest and loving insight to the world of these people.

The other obvious pitfall with any autobiographical piece is the risk of becoming overly self-indulgent. There’s certainly a fair dosage of it but like every other aspect presented in the play it’s unapologetically played with, analysed and cross-examined. That they don’t take it too far is measured by the simple fact that we never get bored or want them to stop.

There are many surprises both comic and tragic along the way, and the time-line is all over the place to put it mildly. Starting from now each little yarn, account, and anecdote takes us back or forth to any point in her life between age about nine and the present, yet I’m never confused as to where each scene fits in the overall chronology.

I shan’t poke deeper into any existential implications or attempt to evoke the masterful deconstruction of theatrical, not to mention familial, convention – that could end up being a complete thesis unto itself. It’s always a challenge for a reviewer to evoke a theatrical experience in words, all the more so with a piece so unique and complete in and of itself as this.

I will point out that effective and powerful as Miranda Harcourt’s presence and delivery is, and however effective she may have been if she had performed it truly solo, the presence and input of husband Stuart lends a huge amount of weight to the prevailing message that none of us are islands and it’s our differences which show up our individuality. Moreover, the striking and well-integrated AV design by Robert Larsen and original music of Thomas Press provide further welcome enhancement.

A post-post-modern retrospective, Biography Of My Skin is the most courageously barefaced confessional work I have witnessed since Mervyn Thomson’s solo opus Passing Through. By the end, there’s a palpable sense of catharsis, as though all the struggles and complications leading up to its conception are finally vindicated, put to rest so that now the life they have been attempting to create all this time can now ensue.
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Review by Hannah Smith 10th Apr 2010

There is something creepy and voyeuristic about the way we read glossy magazines spreads about the intimate boring details of the home lives of celebrities. There is no reason why we should. We do. It is an industry worth billions of dollars.

The publicity for Biography Of My Skin speaks to this cultural obsession. Miranda Harcourt is famous, about as famous as people in New Zealand ever are until they make it onto a monetary note. In this work she and her husband, writer Stuart McKenzie, invite us into their marriage to hear the nitty-gritty details of their life together. It sounds self-indulgent and egotistical and a bit like making money off a New Weekly spread on your newborn baby, but it isn’t like that.

It’s not like that because the play is not really about the stories, it is about their means of presentation. Miranda is talking about Stuart in words that have been written by Stuart and so we cannot be sure which are true, which are embellished, what really happened (if anything did) and how either of the two feel about the situation. Is Miranda annoyed, or is Stuart annoyed, or did the two of them decide it would be good if ‘Miranda’ got annoyed about something two thirds of the way through the show? This kind of trickery constantly draws our attention to the device rather than the material.

It is also surprisingly funny. There is an unexpected ironic humour that flavours the piece; particularly in the way we are invited to view the ‘characters’ of Miranda and Stuart.

This season is a restaging of the premier at Downstage in 2009. I did not see the original, but others inform that they haven’t changed anything, and why would you with a production this tight? Slick is probably even a better word. As soon as the lights dim you can tell that you are in the hands of professionals who know exactly what they are doing. Miranda Harcourt knows how to act. Stuart McKenzie knows how to write. Tim Spite’s direction is so smooth as to be unnoticeable. Paul O’Brien (Lighting), Robert Larsen (AV Design), Thomas Press (Sound and Music) and Andrew Foster (Set) fulfil their design roles near faultlessly (though I do believe I spotted a spelling mistake in the word ‘assault’ on one of the AV titles).

In fact, the whole piece looks and feels like an iMac. The stage is dominated by a large white-framed screen on which various people who have had an impact on Miranda’s life (some playing themselves, others playing others) are projected. They are filmed against a minimalist white background reminiscent of the PC vs. Mac ads of the early 2000’s. The whole style is glossy and smooth and feels, to me, a little dated.

Despite the polish of the AV, I was more excited as soon as there were two performers on the stage. The energy got a boost, the stakes were raised and the whole thing felt less stage-managed, well rehearsed and gimmicky and more as if there was some actual risk involved. Which, for a piece that is an exposé of the inner workings of a marriage, there generally was not.

This show wasn’t for me. I didn’t connect with it. I could see how technically perfect it was, and I was surrounded by an audience having a happy chuckle, but I am not the target market. It is pitched at people who can say wryly to one another “Kids. They change everything. How did we (you and me), get to be us (this family)?” I am not those people. Yet.

But plenty of people are, and Biography of My Skin is for them.
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Review by Mark Westerby 15th Oct 2009

Review by Laurie Atkinson [Reproduced with permission of Fairfax Media] 12th Oct 2009

Downstage is on a roll with yet another top quality and highly entertaining New Zealand work, Stuart McKenzie’s portrait of his wife, Miranda Harcourt, and their marriage. I thought I was going to see a solo play but it turns out that while Miranda takes centre stage for most of the time she shares the stage and a vast screen that covers the entire back of the stage with many others throughout its 85 minutes in Tim Spite’s immaculate production.

If you think this is the apotheosis of luvviedom you are mistaken. Tim Spite writes in the programme that by turning the lens on themselves, they are holding a mirror to the audience. The truth of this was demonstrated to me when the lady next to me, a tourist from overseas who had never heard of the Harcourt family, said that she was thoroughly engaged and entertained throughout the performance.

While there are scenes of pathos and poignancy what saves the play from a surfeit of egocentricity is its honesty and the deprecating humour of both husband and wife and from the cleverness of its structure as their differing points of view are bounced off each other and one is never quite sure where reality and fiction begin and end as the conventions of theatre are turned inside out with Stoppardian-like skill.

Arguments develop between Miranda on stage and Stuart on screen (all the filmed sequences are brilliantly presented by Robert Larsen) and tensions occur when Miranda deviates from the script which Stuart, upset playwright and quality control supervisor, demands she stick to. She leaves in a huff and Tim Spite has to take over her role reading her lines from the back of the theatre.

Camiknickers, old boy and girl friends, seat belts, a hand-made skin lotion, a wedding dress, Gloss, Princess Diana, and well-known and unknown New Zealanders as well as criminals all play a part in this portrait of a marriage and an actress who learns that she can’t act her way through giving birth to her daughter. It was received with rapturous applause.
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Review by John Smythe 10th Oct 2009

If, like me, you found the promotional stories (all slight variations on the necessarily circumspect media release) less than inspiring, forget them: Biography of My Skin is well worth going to. It is funny, insightful, shocking, poignant, extraordinarily personal and finally generous. A gift.

In telling the warts-and-all story of the half-life of herself, leaving no metaphorical pimple unsqueezed, Miranda Harcourt and her writer /husband Stuart McKenzie transcend mere anecdote, narrative and gossip to survey the nature of life itself, in our times.

Billed as "a self portrait without make up", it gets you guessing how much is made up, what conflicts occurred in the process of its creation and whether the make up sex was good. Sorry if that seems a bit intrusive but given where they take us in her and their lives, it is perfectly apropos.

The story-telling is as entertaining as anything we’ve seen from Peter Ustinov et al (oops, showing my age there) and is infinitely more theatrically inventive than that dire John Cleese show a few years back. Compared with such shows, Biography of My Skin is on a different planet.

A large back-projection screen (AV design by Robert Larsen) backs the forestage. Miranda’s eyes precede her extreme close-up ‘entrance’ and she engages our empathy with her first observation: "I always wanted to inhabit someone else’s skin." Who has not felt that at some point? Her shambolic real-time entrance with a large red suitcase – "My clothes were in the dryer!" – brings prosaic reality into the picture, to vie with the larger images, of self and others.

The quest for self is one theme that threads through childhood, adolescence, dissolute young adulthood, marriage and parenthood; not revealed in a linear fashion. Yet amid the minutiae of this particular life the big questions about life and death – including Stuart’s ‘Death of God’ theology – are confronted, experienced and embraced.

Then there is the deconstruction, not only of Miranda’s life but of story-telling itself, provoking some very funny and dramatically conflicted existential and metaphysical moments. The highly theatricalised question of who is in control goes to the heart of most of our public and private lives and relationships.

At one point, just to cite one example, Miranda has a surprising reaction to the yet-to-happen death of Stuart. Is this Stuart bravely scripting what he knows to be Miranda’s truth or is she having to play out his warped fantasy?

The screen brings on some surprising cameos, from real people role-playing themselves and actors role-playing others, and the interaction between stage and screen is terrific, thanks also to operator Marc Edwards.

Director Tim Spite has worked with Harcourt, McKenzie and the creative team – including Paul O’Brien (lighting); Thomas Press (original music and sound design) – to bring a light touch to profound themes while ensuring the powerful moments connect. The means by which Miranda exits, for the interval, and returns for the second half, is a fabulous piece of theatrical illusion.

It has to be added that the lives Miranda and Stuart have led, as co-creators of theatre work and films especially, have not been commonplace. Some shocking things have occurred that prod the nerve-ends to bring the question of control – of personal responsibility – into even starker relief (if that’s the word).

The final story – about loss, recovery and what is finally important – is a simultaneously satirical, whimsical and profound distillation of the central question: where exactly does truth lie?

If you thought, from the publicity, that this was an egotistical exercise, it proves to be quite the opposite. By being ruthlessly honest with themselves and each other about their personal experiences, they give us access to a great deal more. Not to be missed.
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