That Face, Duke of York's, London
Oedipus lets rip in the upper classes
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
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Polly Stenham must be (in roughly equal parts) the envy, despair and inspiration of fledgling dramatists. She wrote That Face when she was 19. She scooped three awards after the premiere at the Royal Court. And, with this transfer to the Duke of York's, she's the youngest dramatist to hit the West End in nearly 50 years. It can't make it any easier for young fellow-playwrights that this runaway success is richly deserved. That Face is a razor-sharp dissection of a dysfunctional upper-middle-class family that achieves a rare balance of raw emotion and knowing, black comedy.
Jeremy Herrin's pitch-perfect production is dominated by a dishevelled double bed, where Martha (a superlative Lindsay Duncan), a well-heeled drink- and drug-abusing divorcée, plays disturbingly incestuous games with her teenage son Henry (Matt Smith), who has dropped out of school to look after her. The mother's name is a nod to the heroine of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and as she stalks blearily around Duncan veers between bitchy, hard-bitten swagger, ironic self-dramatisation and suffocating neediness.
Matt Smith is heart-rending as he gradually reveals the depth of the boy's trauma. When the absentee, remarried father (Julian Wadham) returns to sort out the mess that his own neglect has caused, poor Henry's masochistic addiction to the co-dependency trap becomes pitiably blatant.
The play begins in the dorm of a girl's public school with a sadistic initiation ceremony that smacks more of Abu Ghraib than Mallory Towers. Stenham's ear for the heartless prattle of privileged teenagers and their unswerving sense of entitlement is comically spot-on. But if Henry's younger sister, Mia (Hannah Murray), at first gives the impression of being an unfeeling loose cannon, her detachment proves to be deceptive as her appreciation of the culpabilities and emotional costs becomes clearer. The dramatist also beautifully handles the moment of belated tragic insight when Martha is no longer able to ignore the damage to her precious boy, and tenderly lets him go. This is a dazzling debut that leaves you impatient for Stenham's second play.
'That Face' to 5 July (0870 060 6623); 'Boris Godunov' transfers to the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), to 17 May
