comedy feature
Edinburgh Fringe’s Next Top Model
Ruth Johnston promises not to feed the models with model-turned-actress Sara Standring
Jokingly asking Sara Standring if she’d like to do ‘Home & Away’ garners the response “maybe if I lived in Australia, doll!” This might have got me off on the wrong foot with the New Zealand-born actress and ex-international model, but her hearty laughter suggested forgiveness. Standring is performing her one-woman show ‘Please Don’t Feed The Models’ at this year’s Fringe, and is adamant that her theatre is all about the comedy.
Knowing that her good looks are never going to make people feel sorry for her, Standring doesn’t take herself too seriously. “I thought how about I do a show where a woman is funny, intelligent, and beautiful. That will really fuck people off!” She laughs. Humour might be a defence mechanism, but she knows modelling is “an easy subject to take the piss out of.”
Nevertheless, I think she is aware of the dichotomy she has created in a show which she admits started out as “kinda therapy”. “After fourteen years as an international model, you don’t really do ‘Vogue’ anymore,” she says of a career that generally has a short life-span. Although reluctant to be too critical of the industry that allowed her to travel the world, and “make a ton of money,” Standring is refreshingly honest about her personal experience, recalling spending her sixteenth birthday alone in Tokyo (“I don’t know what my mother was thinking!”) as the impetus behind the show.
Despite this, Standring disagrees that she is politically exposing the artifice of the modelling industry. “I have always been one for a bit of comedy, so I am not on some kind of crusade,” she says. Standring may not be taking the topic too seriously but beyond the assertions that it is a comedy, there are suggestions that she is giving an insider’s account of a world where models are often voiceless. Indeed, her promotional photograph bears the surprised expression of a woman who is shocked by her own nakedness, although Standring is candid enough to expose the falsities of the industry, admitting the photo was air-brushed. “I thought it was fitting, I’ll just smooth out that bump that is actually a stomach!”
Standring talks with enthusiasm about her show, giving snippets that expose, with artistic licence, the stereotypical, but very real world of heightened illusions and misguided ambitions. “There is the gay assistant, the perfecting of walks, the agro-boredom catwalk faces. One of my characters captures the ‘face of an angel, mouth like a sewer’ model.” Indeed this might encapsulate her own experience as a woman who has had to use her humour and intelligence to detract from the beautiful illusion her looks have created.
Underneath the humour I suspect ‘Please Don’t Feed The Models’ is a personal journey, part therapy, part send up of a crazy industry, and part determination to prove she can act. So, would she really like to do ‘Home & Away?’ “Fuck yeah!” She exclaims. “It’s acting and regular money. You take opportunities when you get them, or you write your own stuff and get it out there.” Astute enough to understand the appeal of popular culture, this is exactly what Standring is doing. And it is no coincidence that her show, however inadvertently, does allude to ‘America’s Next Top Model.’
Amongst the depressing, morbid, and political theatre lurking inside this year’s Fringe programme, Standring is hoping that her show, while certainly relevant, might nevertheless add some light relief. “Well, I don’t know what to do about Zimbabwe,” she laughs, “but I do know about modelling!”
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Sara Standring's 'Please Don’t Feed The Models' was on at Underbelly’s Baby Belly.
published: Oct-2008
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