A good start towards a personal and intimate look into childhood pain and recovery with a splash of humour and levity.
Lipstick doesn’t make you pretty is a personal story about family, self-image, bullying and the effect of childhood on adulthood. Creator and performer Christine Fang viscerally relives moments from her life in the intimate setting of the Baron’s Court Theatre. The show was honest and forthright, giving audiences a comprehensive look into Christine’s life and challenges.
The show’s strengths lie in Christine’s unique personality and bravery. She held nothing back on stage, engaging with the text and committing fully to the wide range of emotions her character experienced. Her humour was playful and energetic, reaching out to the far corners of the space. The show runs at about an hour making it an accessible piece for anyone to go and see.
Despite its emotional fluency, the show lacked a cohesive plot or structure. The program states “a woman participates in a new mental health treatment and is confronted with memories keeping her stuck in the past.” While there were allusions to this “treatment” throughout the piece, they were few and far between, and did not ground the play as a central theme. Instead, the treatment references felt as though they were added after the fact as a premise to showcase snippets from Christine’s life.
All one person shows contend with the tug of war between providing an audience with information and patently telling them the information. Unfortunately, Lipstick doesn’t make you pretty became a victim of “spoon feed theatre.” Without a clear plot device to fall back on, much of the play ends up telling the audience what to think and what was happening rather than showing us.
The format alternated between impersonations of people from Christine’s past and interview style explanations for the trauma these people caused. The interviews suffered from exposition but were clearly connected to an emotional place. There was a brief and intriguing suggestion that the memories were part of a science fiction style “simulation,” but the idea was never fully explored. Nevertheless, the impersonations were funny and transformative and far and away the most engaging part of the piece.
Another strength of the piece was its deft and interesting use of different languages. Christine switched from English to French to German to Mandarin seamlessly. Despite only speaking two of those languages, I was able to follow what she was saying perfectly. This was also another area where Christine seemed most comfortable within her performance.
Tech and set were necessarily very minimal, given the physical constraints of the theatre. There were lighting changes which were done smoothly and helped give the show some authenticity. However, there were too many different colours and schemes which seemed
disconnected from what was happening on stage. The show would have benefited from more sound and music, in order to add texture, since just one person’s voice can become quite repetitive, even monotonous, without something to break it up.
Christine is very clearly a talented actor. She performed memories and impressions with gusto and humour. The writing, however, restricted her performance, making it impossible for me as an audience member to fully engage, due to a lack of cohesive plot or through line. Christine finished the show with a statement that it was “a work in progress” and the “first step in a long journey,” and encouraged the audience to reach out with comments and criticisms. With this in mind, I think the show has potential to evolve into a great piece, but it requires some story devices to help it on its way.
I am looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.