That Face

Published Monday 12 May 2008 at 13:50 by William McEvoy

First performed at the Royal Court last year, Polly Stenham’s much-hyped play deals with posh people in meltdown.

The characters are familiar - a screwed up but charismatic mother, stern but absent father, dysfunctional teenagers. They lash out at each other, unleashing messy emotions and unspoken jealousies. Yet a good ear for dialogue and some fine performances can’t disguise the play’s drifting structure and lack of dynamism.

The action is triggered by an overlong opening in which two teenage girls, Mia and Izzy, torture a sedated and hooded classmate who ends up in hospital. Switch to Mia’s mother’s flat. We first think Martha and Henry are lovers, not mother and son. Lindsay Duncan’s Martha is woozily sexy, her voice husky with cigarettes and eroticism. Henry is like an overgrown puppy on the maternal leash.

When Mia’s businessman father Hugh returns from Hong Kong to stop her being expelled, the play moves towards its predictable showdown between mother and father. But this is all familiar territory. There’s lots of shouting, the dialogue sometimes smarts with old wounds and points scored. Yet we never really learn much about the characters and their past. The children are caught in the middle, but it’s hard to care about them or understand Henry’s final breakdown in front of his shocked parents.

Director Jeremy Herrin injects pace and snappiness into the dialogue and scene changes are fluid. But the characters are not anchored to a real time and place and without a sense of their past, they feel much more like types than recognisable individuals.