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# Losing Face and the trouble with ageing well
- URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/losing-face-and-the-trouble-with-ageing-well/
- Published: 2026-07-26T23:00:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-16T12:36:53.000Z
- Description: Marieke Hardy’s Losing Face turns the contemporary project of “ageing well” into grotesque farce. But as the bodies become stranger and the jokes keep coming, a more uncomfortable question emerges: what exactly are we laughing at?
- Author: Ellen M. Scott
- Tags: Essays

There is a point in [*Losing Face*](https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2026/losing-face?ref=melbournestagereview.com) when a dead woman is strapped to a bellboy trolley, arms spread almost cruciform, and transformed into what looks like a grotesque wellness Christmas tree. Bags of yellow collagen hang on her. An LED mask casts a gruesome red glow across her face. At her feet is an assortment of spiritual paraphernalia. Someone has changed her into loose, coarse cotton, as though death were merely an inconvenient interruption on the way to yoga.

And still the jokes keep coming. So does the laughter.

Mine included.

It has been a good few years for ageing. Or at least for its rebrand. Apparently the phrase “anti-ageing” has become slightly embarrassing. Too hostile, perhaps. Too obviously suggestive of the possibility that getting older might be something to oppose. In its place have come gentler formulations: healthy ageing, positive ageing, pro-ageing, skin longevity. The beauty industry increasingly talks not about reversing age but about extending the period in which skin remains healthy, resilient and vital. “Skin longevity” is now sufficiently established to be described as one of beauty and wellness’s major trends.

The language is kinder. The work has not necessarily gone away. Wrinkles can still be reduced. Collagen can still be stimulated. Dark spots corrected. Skin firmed, tightened and plumped. We are simply invited to understand these activities differently. They belong not to a futile war against time but to the responsible maintenance of the body we have been given.

We are not anti-ageing. We are “ageing well”.

![Older woman receiving a cosmetic injection near her eye.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/pexels-cottonbro-7582553.jpg)

Photo: Cottonbro Studio / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/medic-give-injection-in-forehead-7582553/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)

This distinction becomes rather harder to sustain in Marieke Hardy’s *Losing Face*, directed by Leticia Cáceres for Melbourne Theatre Company (22 June–25 July 2026).

Three old friends — Jo, Simone and Lauren — have arrived at a luxury wellness retreat to celebrate Jo turning fifty.

Happy birthday. Let’s fix you.

Under the ministrations of Tomas, a spectacularly self-regarding wellness guru, bodies are cut, injected, inflated, bandaged and displayed. Surgically enhanced lips resemble a “Bubble O’Bill”. Simone emerges with freshly trimmed arms, blood appearing above the dressings. Lauren acquires a hugely bandaged backside.

Jo, Simone and Lauren are not remotely dignified about any of it. Drugs are retrieved from underwear. A pre-surgery bender ends with the women dragging home an illuminated Guzman y Gomez sign. Desire remains enthusiastically bodily. Tomas makes his entrance elevated above them, spotlighted like a contestant on an old-fashioned talent show, a kind of wellness messiah. The women swoon. One responds to his attentions by enthusiastically fanning her vagina.

It is extremely funny.

But fifty is an interesting birthday at which to stage all this. The women of *Losing Face* are not old. They are middle-aged. Yet perhaps that is precisely the point. The contemporary project of ageing well does not begin in old age. Increasingly, it begins before ageing has had the discourtesy to become particularly visible.

Aesthetic medicine even has a word for the more extreme version of this logic: [prejuvenation](https://academic.oup.com/asjopenforum/article/doi/10.1093/asjof/ojad061/7209250?login=false&ref=melbournestagereview.com). Rather than waiting for the signs of ageing and attempting to reverse them, interventions begin earlier to prevent those signs becoming established in the first place. Elsewhere, the language of “skinspan” now borrows from healthspan: the objective becomes extending the period during which skin retains a healthy — and explicitly youthful — appearance.

The ageing body becomes a project with no obvious starting point and, as *Losing Face* will eventually demonstrate, no obvious end.

Heather Widdows has argued that beauty has increasingly acquired something of the force of an [ethical ideal](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-08035-6%5F3?ref=melbournestagereview.com): bodily maintenance is entangled with effort, discipline, self-care and the requirement to keep working on oneself. The idea is useful here because the wellness retreat in *Losing Face* is not really offering its women frivolity. It offers work.

Work on the face. Work on the arms. Work on the breasts. Work on the arse.

The production gives this idea a beautifully ridiculous physical form in an impractical designer chair. Lauren must contort herself simply to use it, upon arrival at the retreat. Later, newly operated and heavily bandaged, she circles it like a dog trying to settle before painfully lowering herself down. Fashion has made an object worse at performing its most basic function. Around it, wellness is doing something remarkably similar to human bodies. 

Against their increasingly incapacitated bodies stands Tomas. Lithe, strong, flexible and comically sexual, he represents another possibility altogether. His is a body that can actually do things, surrounded by bodies being rendered increasingly dysfunctional in pursuit of improvement.

![Wil King as Tomas stands elevated above four women on the wellness retreat set in Losing Face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Wil-King--Genevieve-Morris--Christie-Whelan-Browne--Michala-Banas-and-Madeleine-Sami.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Wil King, Genevieve Morris, Christie Whelan Browne, Michala Banas and Madeleine Sami in **Losing Face*, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo: Pia Johnson

And yet Hardy is too canny to make Jo, Simone and Lauren merely victims of all this. They want things.

They are vain and hungry, sexual and jealous, funny and cruel. They participate in the economy around them. They desire Tomas and what he sells. One of the great conveniences of dismissing beauty culture as something patriarchy simply *does to women* is that it leaves very little room for the messy business of women wanting beauty, enjoying it, using it, refusing it, investing in it, competing through it and changing their minds about it.

Research on [women’s responses to ageist beauty norms](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-08035-6?ref=melbournestagereview.com) suggests something similarly untidy: accommodation can sit beside resistance, acceptance beside continued beauty work. The choices do not divide themselves cleanly into liberated and oppressed. Neither do Hardy’s women.

This messiness matters because looking good carries value. Sociologists have called some of that value [aesthetic capital](https://www.emerald.com/books/oa-edited-volume/13544/chapter/84205799/Physical-Appearance-as-a-Form-of-Capital-Key?ref=melbournestagereview.com): the social advantage that can attach to being perceived as attractive. *Losing Face* takes the metaphor rather more literally.

We eventually discover that Tomas has been harvesting youth itself, extracting collagen from one body to transfer its value to another. The metaphor has become flesh itself. And here *Losing Face* begins to brush against another contradiction in the way women age. Research with older women has documented the familiar experience of becoming socially less visible with age. In [Sue Westwood’s work](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08952841.2023.2197658?ref=melbournestagereview.com), one woman captures it with painful economy: “It’s the not being seen that is most tiresome.”

The women of *Losing Face* have not reached old age. But they inhabit a culture that has given them ample warning of its possibility.

There is a peculiar doubleness here. A woman can become less visible while the signs of ageing on her body become more so. The wrinkle. The sag. The grey hair. The changing distribution of lumps. The accumulation of evidence on a surface that increasingly fails to resemble the one we have learned to value.

The newer language of longevity does not necessarily escape this bind. A [recent account of longevity culture](https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jul/14/anti-ageing-science-longevity-culture?ref=melbournestagereview.com) argues that the old hostility to ageing can survive quite comfortably beneath more scientific and affirmative language; women continue to carry a disproportionate burden of the expectation to remain visibly youthful.

Age. Embrace it. Celebrate it.

Just make sure you do it *successfully*.

*Losing Face* takes this demand and makes a spectacle of it. Its middle-aged women become impossible not to look at.

![Madeleine Sami displays her heavily bandaged buttocks as Genevieve Morris reacts beside her in Losing Face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Madeleine-Sami-and-Genevieve-Morris.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson--1-.jpg)

Madeleine Sami and Genevieve Morris in **Losing Face*, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo: Pia Johnson

Their bodies become larger, stranger, more incapacitated and more spectacular as the play proceeds. A minor characcter - competitive guest, who periodically appears at the retreat sporting a preposterously enormous hat, seems less an aberration than the logical destination waiting at the end of the path.

And we laugh.

This is where I become less certain about what *Losing Face* is doing to us.

Or, perhaps more accurately, what we are doing with it.

Because what exactly are we laughing at?

The women? Tomas? The “Bubble O’Bill” lips? The recognition of beauty practices we already find faintly absurd? The grotesque distance between the promise of improvement and the wounded bodies limping around the stage? Hardy’s language? Cáceres’s exquisite physical comedy? Our own susceptibility to some milder version of the same promises?

The laughter moves too quickly to settle. That matters.

If we were simply laughing at foolish middle-aged women mutilating themselves in an attempt to remain young, *Losing Face* would be a much meaner and much less interesting play. If we were simply laughing at an industry that exploits them, it would be a much easier one. Instead, the object of satire and the object of laughter keep slipping over one another.

Then Jo dies.

At the performance I attended, standby cover, Lucy Goleby, played Jo with script in hand. If this constrained her performance, it was remarkably difficult to detect. Goleby brought a striking lifeforce to Jo: physically expansive, vocally dynamic, utterly committed to the production’s vulgarity. She seemed fresh in a world devoted to manufacturing freshness.

And then Jo dies.

Death should settle things. At the very least, it should provide the natural limit to the wellness project. There is, after all, only so much collagen can reasonably be expected to accomplish. But Tomas does not encounter Jo’s death and become contrite. Nor does he seem especially defensive. He simply extends the logic of wellness beyond its natural limit. Jo becomes his ultimate project.

Collagen is pumped into dead veins. Red light illuminates dead skin. Spirituality and technology and beauty treatment accumulate around a body that has already provided the only possible answer to his promises of mastery over mortality.

The image is horrifying. It is also ridiculous. The profound has been covered in tinsel.

There is something particularly sharp about this joke now. Longevity culture increasingly collapses boundaries among health, beauty and the postponement of ageing: cellular health, collagen production, skin longevity, biohacking, healthspan. 

![Person lying down wearing a red LED light therapy face mask.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/pexels-dinc-tapa-691009-7216285.jpg)

Photo: Ding Tapa / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-a-person-with-an-led-face-mask-on-7216285/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)

The rhetoric is not necessarily fraudulent — some of the underlying practices have legitimate health or dermatological purposes — but the categories have become remarkably friendly neighbours.

Hardy simply keeps following the promise: if ageing can be managed, why stop at death?

More remarkably, Simone and Lauren do not break the logic of the farce either. They do not call the police. They attempt to steal Jo’s body back. To distract Tomas, they deploy the currency of the world they are supposedly now resisting: sex and vanity. Simone has already seen through Tomas. It hardly matters. She falls straight back under his spell.

Nobody learns very much. The farce only escalates. The nurse, revealed to be seventeen despite her middle-aged appearance (the result of Tomas's collagen harvesting), finally abandons him, only to announce her intention to meet another teenager and see if she can get fingered. Even liberation refuses dignity.

Eventually Simone and Lauren haul Jo’s body to the upper reaches of the set, now recontextualised as a pier. An earlier “fuck it” bucket list had included Jo’s desire to be “shark bait”, so they decide to oblige.

A few superficial words are uttered. The body goes over. Moments later, the soundscape supplies the screams and alarm of a crowded beach discovering what has just landed among them.

Unperturbed, Simone and Lauren reconcile the long-standing quarrel that drove much of the relational drama throughout the play. “I’ll buy you a marg\[arita\].”

Blackout. Applause.

Even then, *Losing Face* is not finished refusing death its gravity. The competitive guest, whom we might reasonably have assumed had expired during an impossibly long stint in the ice bath, suddenly springs back to life, thrilled by how much younger she feels.

Blackout again. Applause.

It would be easy to see the persistence of comedy after the death as a failure of tone: a farce that encounters tragedy but cannot generate sufficient pathos to carry it. I think that interprets the play almost exactly backwards.

*Losing Face* refuses to become a different kind of play because someone has died.

Its darker trick is that death itself is absorbed into the farce. The machine does not stop. It decorates the corpse and carries on. So do we.

At the performance I attended, laughter rolled continuously through the stalls. It diminished a little after Jo’s death, but it certainly did not disappear. I kept laughing too.

This is where the question that followed me out of the theatre really begins.

Hardy and Cáceres have placed these women inside something like a goldfish bowl. Their vanity, betrayals, bodily indignities and appetites are magnified into grotesque spectacle, and we are given permission to look. More than that, we are given permission to enjoy looking.

For a moment, the internal logic of the play becomes powerful enough that disposing of Jo’s body at a crowded beach can seem like a reasonable solution to a practical problem. Described outside the theatre, the same action is horrifying.

One minor character appears to understand this. The nurse can barely look at Simone and Lauren after Jo’s death. She rushes past them. For a moment, she seems to carry the moral conscience of the scene.

She cannot bear to look.

We can.

I don’t think that necessarily makes our looking cruel. Comedy complicates the transaction. We can recognise the absurdity of beauty culture while participating in it. We can know a body has been made grotesque for our amusement while laughing at the culture that made the grotesquerie intelligible. We can be repelled by Tomas and seduced by the theatrical world built around him.

Perhaps we can even recognise ourselves.

The contemporary injunction to “age well” makes that recognition harder to escape. It is difficult to object to health. Or vitality. Or strength. Or taking care of ourselves. The vocabulary has become sufficiently virtuous that the point at which care shades into correction can be remarkably difficult to locate.

![Young woman in profile wearing a red surgical head wrap, with cosmetic surgery markings drawn across her face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/pexels-ben-lyric-74513582-8528647-2.jpg)

Photo: Ben Lyric / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-with-marks-drawn-on-her-face-8528647/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)

What makes *Losing Face* more than a simple satire of the wellness industry is its understanding that there is no clean line between coercion and desire, care and correction, looking and being looked at. Jo, Simone and Lauren do not cross a single line and become ridiculous. They move through a world in which entirely ordinary desires — to remain attractive, to feel sexual, to be noticed, to inhabit a body that feels like one’s own — are attached to an industry with an almost limitless capacity to generate work for itself.

And the ultimate promise beneath all that work remains impossible. The body *will* age. Eventually, it will die.

Then Hardy straps the corpse to a trolley and puts the LED mask back on.

There is something wonderfully insolent about that image. It strips the euphemism from the project. Optimisation encounters the one body that cannot possibly be optimised and simply keeps going.

But *Losing Face* leaves another piece of the machinery less exposed: us.

This is where I wanted Cáceres to turn the screw another fraction. Not by abandoning comedy for pathos. *Losing Face*’s great strength is its refusal to let death rescue us from comedy. A solemn corpse might have offered its own kind of easy moral release: we stop laughing, recognise death, become good people again.

Nor did I need the production to punish us for enjoying itself.

But there was an opportunity to make the laughter catch, however briefly, at the back of our throats. To make us uncertain not only about what we were watching, but about the pleasure we were taking in watching it.

The goldfish bowl is beautifully clear. It might have been made just a little more reflective.

![Four women sit facing the audience beneath three large projected female faces in Losing Face.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/07/Christie-Whelan-Browne--Genevieve-Morris--Michala-Banas-and-Madeleine-Sami.-Photo-by-Pia-Johnson.jpg)

Christie Whelan Browne, Genevieve Morris, Michala Banas and Madeleine Sami in **Losing Face*, Melbourne Theatre Company. Photo: Pia Johnson

Perhaps that is why Jo’s body has stayed with me. Not because Tomas keeps treating it. Of course he does. By then *Losing Face* has taught us exactly what sort of man he is.

What is stranger is how quickly I accepted her body as another comic object. Collagen. LED mask. Cotton donned for yoga. Each addition makes the image worse. Each also makes it funnier.

Death enters the room. The jokes continue.

And perhaps the most interesting question *Losing Face* leaves behind is not why the jokes continue after death.

It is why we keep laughing.