Theatre review: That Face

Launching her career as the watersports fetishist's favourite playwright, Polly Stenham's That Face wasn't just famous for Matt Smith's Astonishing Coup de Théâtre^TM but also for the fact that it was written when she was 19. Exposing the extreme dysfunction of the sort of rich, upper-middle class people who would describe themselves as merely "comfortable," it begins with Mia (Ruby Stokes) getting sent home from boarding school for taking part in a hazing ritual - a ritual she decided to spice up a bit by slipping the 13-year-old victim with Valium she stole from her mother's stash, putting the girl in hospital. Mia's father is returning from Hong Kong to bribe the school into not expelling her, but his imminent arrival means he'll also check in on her mother.

Martha (Niamh Cusack) lives in a London flat with her son Henry (Kasper Hilton-Hille,) in a co-dependent relationship Oedipus would call "a bit icky." In the five years since their parents' divorce, Henry has been looking after his alcoholic, pill-popping mother in a combined parent/husband/son role.

We first find them collapsed in his bed after a night when she had a particularly bad episode she can't remember - but she did take the call from Mia's school during it, prompting them to contact her father instead. Henry's attempts to escape their incredibly toxic relationship are stopped nor just by Martha's sabotage, but by the fact that he's not ready to move away from her either. If the family's latest crisis isn't enough to push Martha over the edge, Henry losing his virginity to Mia's friend Izzy is.

Josh Seymour's production doesn't really play the black comedy in Stenham's play - maybe it's the fact that since 2007 our patience for the people hoarding all the cash telling us how bad they've got it has worn even thinner (in Sarita Gabony's Izzy, the distinction between "posh" and "sociopathic" is essentially meaningless.) But it's probably more to do with the brilliant Cusack's empathetic performance: Her Martha isn't just a bored woman who's kept herself busy with booze and pills, she's a genuinely mentally ill woman who people like her ex-husband Hugh (Dominic Mafham) would rather deal with by hiding her away somewhere to drink herself to death where the neighbours can't see her.

Feeling quite pronounced here is also the specific time of the five years Henry has been looking after his mother (eventually quitting school, theoretically to become an artist, in practice to end up in even more of a coccoon with her.) From the ages of 13 to 18, essentially missing his teenage years and explaining why he's such a mix of old before his time, and overgrown child. Although this may have stood out because I knew the famous ending, which I'm not sure is best served by an in-the-round theatre - from the side I was sitting on I'm not sure it would have been clear what happened if I didn't know. You don't think "needs more piss" is a note you'll ever need, but here we are.

But other than that the intimacy works; the institutional bed from the opening boarding school dorm scene remains the centrepiece of Eleanor Bull's design, later becoming a hospital bed and, when it's where Martha spends her time, another visual clue that maybe she should really be somewhere doctors can keep an eye on her. Whatever different perspectives it might now show, That Face still holds up and shows it wasn't overhyped at the time because of Stenham's youth, and draws you into a deeply uncomfortable watch. Or, alternatively, a utopian vision where if some people have to hoard all the money, at least they're this miserable all the time.

That Face by Polly Stenham is booking until the 7th of October at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.