An after school special for adults

That Face at the Duke of York Theatre, May 14 2008
Written by Polly Stenham
Directed by Jeremy Herrin

‘The family that separates dominos separately into crisis’, could be the by-line of alcoholic Martha’s upper middle class family in Polly Sternham’s ‘That Face’. Left by her husband, for a younger, more amicable alternative, Martha (Lindsay Duncan) flounders, self absorbed, into a cycle of escalating madness dragging her children with her; her son, Henry, (Matt Smith) held oedipal-ly close, her daughter, Mia, (Hannah Murray) held at arms length in boarding school like a pedigree stray.

It is the toppling of Mia’s domino that brings father, Hugh (Julian Wadham), back to London to deal with his erstwhile responsibilities. Armed with Martha’s valium, Mia ‘accidentally’ sends a younger girl, comatose, into hospital and is tossed out of school to Martha’s unwelcoming door, behind which Martha is engaged in a dangerous relationship of mutual and uncomfortably sexualised enabling with her son Henry. The play’s crisis coincides with Henry’s as he, who at 18 has held Martha together for the five years since Hugh’s exodus, has his need for her effortlessly bypassed by his father’s will to have her and her dependencies removed from the equation.

‘That Face’ is a bit like an after school special dealing with alcohol and drug abuse (and possibly even incest) gone wrong. Individual scenes feel real, suggesting an element of the autobiographical but the characters have a short journey making them hard to see as real people. Lindsay Duncan as Martha does a beautiful, graceful, quite Blanche Dubois, alcoholic from her first scene to her last, her walk a language of degraded glamour in itself. Mia begins as an unpredictable, lonely, fifteen year old, boarding school girl and ends similarly and Henry’s downhill gradient is slight: he’s already left school to heal a mother who doesn’t want it. So who is the main character taking the journey most narratives revolve around? Martha commands the greatest attention but the most interesting chapters in her story happen on either side of the play and Mia and Henry’s dominos wobble so wildly in the first two scenes that it feels like being first on the scene of a car crash wondering what happened. Despite this the play has great structure; each scene is well crafted and flows seamlessly into the next helped by the staging, which centres around an increasingly crumpled and detritus accumulating double bed. A dream for drama students, many of these scenes would lose none of their power if seen on their own.

A lot has been made about Sternham’s age, she was 19 when she wrote ‘That Face’, and it shows. Not in an amateur way but in a lack of light and shade. The intensity is there from the first scene, a boarding school initiation more Abu Ghraib than St. Trinians, and then continues to increase to heart attack rate rather than allowing pressure remissions before ramping up the adrenalin to a tremor level crisis. By the climactic scene, where the family is reunited, the dialogue and acting are already at fever pitch and the hysteria that sees Henry, drunk, clad in his mother’s jewels and negligee, pissing on the bed couldn’t push me above my the intensity plateau. It felt like that point in an argument where you’ve already thrown everything breakable and are down to the cushions.

The one comic scene shined out as one of the most memorable: Martha, drunk, but in good spirits, chats cheerily to the talking clock, brilliantly taking up both sides of the conversation. In this play Sternham’s writing is strongest when her stage has only two speaking characters and this scene was no exception.

One of the great benefits of Sternham’s age was the language used by Mia and Henry. It’s good to hear teenage banter that doesn’t sound like the OC sprinkled with try hard hip hop lyrics. Her older characters have strong voices as well; Martha’s dialogue bubbles messily fleshy beneath her well brought up shell and Hugh is the perfect cardboard cut-out absentee father.

This is a well crafted, well written play which takes a fresh, real perspective to themes not much dramatised. Individual scenes easily enlist emotions but without an obvious character to back and the intensity woodpeckering away for its one 90 minute act it left me feeling more hollow than I would have hoped.

‘That Face’ debuted in a much more intimate setting and could have been lost in a west end size theatre but the staging used the extra space to accentuate the feeling of each character being lost instead of just losing them in the emptiness.