University of Cape Town - 2007
Director
On an ordinary evening, a woman is putting the last touches on her makeup. She discovers that she can’t move away from the mirror, she can’t stop looking at herself and hating her face. Her date gets impatient. All of a sudden, a female army from the 1920s invades her room and reveals a wooden sculpture that resembles face of a dictator. Soon, what was her room is filled with a soldier without a face, a lover with a scared face, two people with the same face, an emperor, prostitutes, Greeks… Are all these people attempting to tell her something?
In Wounds to the Face, Howard Barker targets the one thing that is central to our relationship with the outside world, our face. It is after all the first thing we see when meeting someone, and also the first thing they see in us. It is something we do not have much choice in creating, and can never hide. Through a series of scenes, comic, tragic, switching across centuries and various places, and through his powerful use of poetic language, Barker goes on to explore how our face and our perception of other faces can influence every facet of human behaviour.
Photos by Rob Keith.