Sydney Theatre Company presents
Face To Face
A Film by Ingmar Bergman
Adapted For the Stage
By Andrew Upton and Simon Stone

Something is wrong with Jenny but not even she can understand what. She is a woman with both a family and a brilliant career as a psychiatrist. She is intelligent, educated, well adjusted and capable. So, why can’t she sleep at night? And why is it that when she does she is plagued by vivid, terrifying dreams?

When something violent and disturbing happens, Jenny finds her response even more alarming than the incident itself. Shaken to the core, she realises that she has ceased to feel anything: no love, no joy, no fear. And so begins Jenny’s gradual disintegration and a psychological journey through dreams, the past and eventually the present.

Simon Stone and Andrew Upton’s adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film preserves the tonal, thematic and psychological textures of the original, while drawing out the epic theatrical possibilities that the screenplay offers. Face to Face is, like so many of Bergman’s texts, a masterpiece of Freudian theory and is utterly exquisite in the way it explores the human struggle to find hope in despair.

As a director, Stone has been lauded and awarded for his emotionally rich adaptations of Ibsen plays. Now he tackles Bergman, another great Scandinavian writer whose drama – like Ibsen’s – grapples with human crisis in an incredibly blunt and noble way. Kerry Fox plays the extraordinarily complex character of Jenny.

2 hours 30 minutes, including interval
Sydney Theatre