Abroad

That Face

 (Royal Court Upstairs; 88 seats £15 ($30) top)

By DAVID BENEDICT

Matt Smith and Lindsay Duncan star in 'That Face,' the debut of 20-year-old playwright Polly Stenham, at London's Royal Court Upstairs.

LONDON A Royal Court Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Polly Stenham. Directed by Jeremy Herrin.
 
Martha - Lindsay Duncan
Henry - Matt Smith
Mia - Felicity Jones
Hugh - Julian Wadham
Izzy - Catherine Steadman
Alice - Abigail Hood
 

The scenario of "That Face" -- unhappy teenage girl almost expelled from school for bullying; alcohol-addicted mother emotionally dependent upon her son -- doesn't exactly promise an evening of cloudless happiness. Yet despite its predictable downward trajectory, 20-year-old Polly Stenham's remarkable debut play is a paradoxically sweet surprise. She writes about pain with a welcome degree of wit and warmth and, best of all, engaging compassion.

"I would like at best to keep this ... clean, impersonal, professional," says Izzy (Catherine Steadman), brightly. She's one of two expensively educated, middle-class girls at boarding school who are up to no good in the opening scene. In fact, their polite but nasty bout of bullying backfires. But then nothing in the play goes according to plan, and the resulting emotions are anything but clean.

Although Izzy is the ringleader, her cohort Mia (Felicity Jones) blithely ups the ante by feeding their victim 50mg of Valium she filched from her mother Martha (Lindsay Duncan), who is the pivot of the play.

Martha is a mistress of manipulation. Abandoned by her well-to-do husband and never far from cigarettes, booze and prescription drugs, she teeters on the brink of chaos. Her relationship with her estranged daughter is as strained as the one with her adored teenage son Henry (Matt Smith).

While never soft-pedaling Martha's inappropriate behavior, Duncan's bravura perf audaciously turns her into an almost attractive character. With a beguilingly wayward manner, Duncan initially lends Martha a cool, woozy charm. Only later, as she tightens the maternal noose, does she reveal Martha to be, consciously or not, a beautifully spoken monster.

The play's rising temperature is held in check by director Jeremy Herrin in his Royal Court debut. He reins in the emotions but allows his actors to fill Stenham's often elliptical dialogue with a range between blithe banter and strongly underpinned rage.

Martha's most important relationship is with Henry, who has abandoned school in his final years to take care of his mother. Stenham ramps up tension by keeping her foot firmly on the Oedipal accelerator as Martha cajoles and caresses Matt in the large white bed that dominates Mike Britton's otherwise almost bare, white, in-the-round set. Will events teeter over into incest?

That Stenham can flirt with audience expectation this way while still employing restraint is a mark of her wit and early maturity. By the climax, when Martha's divorced husband (Julian Wadham) has returned from Hong Kong and is threatening to have his ex-wife committed for their children's sake, Stenham pushes emotions to gut-wrenching pitch. Before that, however, she maintains impressive detachment.

The energy picks up in the second half, which packs considerable punch because both the observation and writing deepen as the relationships unravel alarmingly.

At the same time as the family fortunes are disintegrating, Stenham keeps the atmosphere taut by refusing the simplistic stance of taking sides. Typically disaffected with her father, Mia is furious with her mother but grows increasingly haunted by fear of what will happen to them all as she begins to understand that actions have consequences.

The contradictory nature of family ties is most fully explored in Henry. Like Mia, he has learned emotional manipulation from his mother. In the drama's lightest scene, he plays Martha like a violin, letting her think she's being marvelously tolerant when she accepts his being gay, whereas in truth he has just cheerfully lost his virginity to a girl.

The success of that scene is due in part to the power of the immensely versatile Smith. Tall and pliant, he expresses every emotion throughout his entire body. Smith turns worrying into a wholly physical activity without ever descending into neurotic tics. Henry's affectingly torn between the responsibility of too-early adulthood and lost innocence, and his howl of abandonment is heartbreaking. That audience-slaying moment sets the seal on Stenham's auspicious debut.

Sets and costumes, Mike Britton; lighting, Natasha Chivers; sound, Emma Laxton; production stage manager, Sue Bird. Opened April 26, 2007. Reviewed April 27. Running time: 1 HOUR, 45 MIN.