Faultless And Torrance Take Their Faces Off

Note: This review is from 2005

Review by Steve Bennett

Female double act Judith Faultless and Alice Torrance look like, well, two serious minded thirty-something women who might start up their own John Travolta film club for excitement.  However, they are actually delivering a fresh and original hour of action-packed physical comedy, even if it does revolve around the star of Look Who’s Talking.

The premise is that the audience are guests at the inaugural night of the duo’s Film Club, but it soon transpires that – in a desperate bid for attention and urged on by her evil twin, a fish mortician – Torrance has planted a bomb to explode sometime in the next fifty minutes.  The only way for Faultless to find the device and save the day is to swap faces with Torrance.  If this premise sounds utterly ridiculous, then it is.  And if it sounds like a certain John Travolta action thriller, then it is that too.

The writing is mostly brilliant, combining a structured narrative with three-dimensional characters and a smattering of genuinely funny lines – many of them self-aware at the madness of their show’s concept. 

However, where the duo really shine is in the realm of physical comedy, as both actresses give wildly exaggerated performances that are at complete contradiction with their initial appearances, to fantastic effect.  Large physical set pieces – such as the fight between the evil Twins or the frankly quite frightening dance finale – are hilarious, but there’s also more nuanced, subtle humour such as the wild, slightly manic stare forever in Torrance’s eyes.

The two relentlessly work to keep the show interesting, never repeating the same basis for a gag or set piece and so perpetually generating new ideas.  They make brilliant use of the stage, deploying a central screen (under that  Film Club pretence) behind which facial operations and conversations between characters played by the same actress can occur. 

Somewhere around the show’s middle, the plotline does get a little too complicated and the laughs wear thin. There is a large portion set in a church involving a nun but – even now – I’m not entirely sure how it all ended up there or what impact it had on the show’s main thrust. 

But in the final segments, things do pick up and compensate for this slight dip in quality, resulting in a wonderful hour of silliness taken to extremes by this most unlikely of duos.

Review date: 1 Jan 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

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