Polly Stenham
THAT FACE
Mike Bartlett
MY CHILD
Royal Court Theatre
Two new plays at the Royal Court deal brutal blows to any complacency about winners and losers in family break-up. Both playwrights are very young – Polly Stenham, a graduate of the Royal Court’s Young Writer’s Programme, is just twenty, and Mike Bartlett is twenty-five – but each takes a broad and piercing look at the trouble that ensues when parent/child bonds are damaged.
Stenham’s debut play That Face is stunning, in both senses of the word. She uses a wide emotional palette, always sensitive to the ways language changes alongside our relationships with those around us, and how it reveals what people really feel, or don’t feel, even when they think they are exercising self-control. On one level, Stenham’s theme is familiar: A successful father leaves one family to start a new one; the divorce displaces the normal patterns of the child/parent relationship; so that the son, Henry (Matt Smith), becomes the caretaker of his wounded alcoholic mother, Martha (Lindsay Duncan), while his sister, Mia, played with sullen vulnerability by Felicity Jones, joins the queen-bee bully of her boarding school in brutal initiation rites. The antics of these mean girls leave their thirteen-year-old victim beaten and drugged. Mia’s father, Hugh (Julian Wadham portrays a decent sort of chap, totally oblivious to his destructive detachment), rushes in to “fix things” with Mia’s school when she is threatened with expulsion. Throughout this crisis, Martha enacts her own play with her son, focusing solely on her own needs. Pampering, clinging and menacing, Lindsay Duncan is vulnerable, impossible and irresistible. Under Jeremy Herrin’s direction, this mother/son relationship is unsettling in its sexuality, but the genuine, complex tenderness is never obscured.
That Face demonstrates that love is no bar to bad behaviour. With the exception of the unconvincing, unremitting hostility Martha expresses to Mia, the characters are confused and cowed by their mutual anger. Sometimes the verbal punch-ups start on the soap opera map, but then Stenham’s text will sharply twist away from what is expected. Mia accuses the father, “You could have stopped all this. But you left. And she was sick when you left. But you left anyway”. Predictably, Hugh casts doubt on her ability to understand. “When you’re older –”, he begins with assured condescension, but Mia cuts him off: “You won’t know me when I’m older”. The final five minutes of the play show Stenham’s astonishing dramatic dexterity. The four family members spin round one another, their views of each other in constant flux. The first step in this dizzy finale is not much more than adolescent self-pity (“It must be Christmas time surely? All of us together in one room. Oh no. I forgot. We don’t even do that at Christmas”), but Henry is soon overwhelmed by his frustrated, jealous effort to protect his mother: “Daddy, you left me here all by myself. So I did what I thought you should have done. Taken care of her. Like she was broken. ’Cept I thought I could fix her”. His entire personality decomposes upon the discovery that, in spite of sacrificing five of his teenage years to caring for his mother, his efforts cannot match those of his father. Matt Smith as Henry, helped by the language-sensitive script, shifts seamlessly from spoiled son to protective brother to terrified child; and Lindsay Duncan undergoes a transformation from near-psychotic manipulator to a woman ready to salvage some remnant of maternal responsibility.
The helplessness of Mia and Henry at the close of the play is in perfect symmetry with the opening scene in which Mia at school exercises her brutal power over a younger girl. On the one hand, Stenham is showing us that those who are helpless and hurt at home are the mean girls in the dorm, but Mia’s reflection on her actions has a wider resonance and could be lifted straight from an army reservist’s account of her participation in the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities. As she and her brother visit the unconscious girl in hospital, Mia tells her shocked brother that he is taking things “out of context”. This defence is of course comically appalling, but it is also chillingly apt in explaining how ordinary people do evil things. In the dorm, at night, she explains, “It’s different there; different rules, different power levels . . . it’s messed up . . . . And people are bored . . . . And some stuff . . . well, it seems OK. Allowed even”. In such a context she could only see “the teeny tiny particles. Not the whole picture”.
Mike Bartlett’s My Child shows the damage of marital break-up from a different perspective – that of a man being deprived of his fatherhood by divorce and a new marriage. The characters in My Child bear no individual names, just nouns designating them as “Man”, “Woman”, “Child”, and each character explores a sense of self and relationship within those templates. Is it enough to love? Is it enough to be educated and kind? How costly is the failure to perform routine romantic gestures or pay the bills?
Miriam Buether’s set presents a newly designed theatre space – part anonymous Underground carriage, with rails and noise, part convivial pub, with stools and bar. The actors share the space with the audience, who then experience, literally, the vibrations of their anger and frustration. Ben Miles conveys a father’s bewildered intensity as he discovers his own helplessness in sustaining his attachment to his son. He is too clumsy, too confused to be a competent Dad, and his ex-wife, played by an edgy, red-haired Lia Williams, zooms in on this disconnection between the care he feels and what he is able to enact. “We had a nice time”, Miles tells her when he delivers their son home. “He says his arm hurts”, she retorts. Williams portrays material and practical shrewdness alongside human decency, particularly as she cares for her mother, Sara Kestelman; both parents, acting in the name of love, are so intent on their battles with one another that they neglect their son’s bruise which, during the course of this brief and taut play, turns black.
My Child depicts a dysfunctional society, with dysfunctional norms. The nine-year-old son is the disrespectful, materialist brat we’ve heard complained of often enough as “children these days . . .”; but disrespect is what he has been taught to have for those who cannot provide him with the material goods he has been taught to need. “You’re rubbish”, the boy tells his father. “Simon’s father takes him to Hamleys when they go out.” Miles tries, gently, to stem this flow of abuse, reminding his son of their connection: “Do you remember going down the station and watching the trains? . . . You used to love that”. “No. I hated it. It was shit.” Though the son, coolly and convincingly played by Adam Arnold, eventually allows a more sympathetic anger to emerge (“You left us . . .”), Bartlett never lets us forget how permeated Child is with brand superficiality: missing his mother, he dreams that she is playing with him on the Xbox.
Mike Bartlett’s accomplished text, with its jabs of comedy, is well served by Sacha Wares’s direction. Those who get what they want are confident of their deservingness, whereas those with the capacity for self-questioning, are pushed aside. But no one is satisfied: “You didn’t give me what I need”, is the accusation both Man and Woman thrust upon their own parents, and the accusation they will in due course receive. My Child presents a convincing and claustrophobic framework in which attachment remains an unsolved puzzle.
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Terri Apter's books include You Don't Really Know Me!, on mothers and teenage daughters, 2004. She is Senior Tutor at Newnham College, Cambridge.
