THAT FACE
THAT FACE Company B Belvoir St, 11 February-14 March 2010. Photos: Michael Corridore
THE TEMPTATION to quote and agree with Philip Larkin–“They f**k you up, your mum and dad” – is one that few among the disgruntled manage to resist and, having taken it up as a self pitying mantra, fewer still manage to grow up and grow out of it. It’s something that’s been put to playwright Polly Stenham. She was just 19 when she wrote That Face and is now 22. She doesn’t buy the line, as she told Lynn Barber in an interview for The Observer in March last year.
“I disagree,” she told Barber. “It's not anything as simple as that. Because some of the sanest people I know have had the crappest childhoods and some of the most ridiculous people I know have had the best childhoods. I just believe in getting on with it and I don't believe in feeling sorry for yourself. Or thinking that because your parents f**ked you about that makes you entitled to f**k your kids about. That's just stupid.” Indeed.
Her first play That Face is a portrait of a seriously stuffed family. Not an unusual one, mind you, that’s part of what fascinates Stenham and what she was trying to capture: that the dysfunctional family is a norm and can be found in any strata of society. While this might pertain particularly to Britain, where class is a matter of course and the lower classes have traditionally been seen to be the repository of unacceptable behaviour, it’s no less relevant in Australia. That’s because we have a similarly class-ridden society, albeit called something else, and also because upper and middle class f**cked families are the norm here too.
The play opens with two nasty teenage schoolgirls, Mia (Emma Barclay) and Izzy (Krew Boylan) performing an initiation ritual on a terrified younger girl. It’s all jolly boarding school stuff and tacitly condoned by the school authorities. But the jape goes horribly wrong and Mia is sent home pending expulsion. Although the scene is a catalyst for the family drama to come, it also neatly highlights the heedlessly sociopathic behaviour of the over-privileged rich girls and sets the tone of moral paralysis and emotional disruption that follows.
Home for Mia is an apartment shared by her mother Martha (Susie Porter) and 17-year-old brother Henry (Kenji Fitzgerald). Henry has dropped out of school to look after Martha, a pill-popping serious alcoholic whose skills as an emotional manipulator are breathtaking. The relationship between Martha and Henry clearly borders on Oedipal and is depicted with disconcerting knowingness and accuracy. It’s Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams territory and while the influences might be there, Stenham also makes it her own. The play is like a snowdome containing a moment in the lives of the characters who are trapped inside its deceptive prettiness.
Martha is not pleased to see her daughter, who not only is a rival for Henry’s affections but also is not snared in her emotional web. Moments of normalcy break out between the siblings but it can’t last and, unknown to Henry and Martha, a call has been put in to Hugh (Marcus Graham) the husband/father who got away. Stockbroker Hugh lives in Hong Kong with his new family and the price for his peace of mind is humungous school fees and whatever is required to keep Martha in the style to which she is determined to stay accustomed.
Hugh is one of those well meaning but hopeless chaps who thinks a wave of his cheque book will fix everything. He has a stiff upper lip and ramrod back and you can see in a flash why Martha would have overwhelmed him. There is nothing stiff about her, she is a semi-liquified swamp of conflicting desires and wavering will; at once pathetically childlike and irresistibly womanly. She is a true femme fatale – fatal to herself and those around her – all defined and ruled by her addictions.
That Face is tough and uncompromising, yet it has a broad streak of black comedy running through it that, despite monstrous Martha being monstrous Martha, puts it in a different place than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. That’s because Stenham captures quite beautifully the essence of adolescence and the place of that period within a family. The wry humour in the face of awful reality is captivating. Although the play centres on Martha, the point of view smells like teen spirit.
Director Lee Lewis has done a wondrous job with the play starting with casting. Kenji Fitzgerald graduated from NIDA last year and has to be on the nominations list for best newcomer of 2010. He brings to Henry the stilted pride of a boy on the cusp of manhood, then travels through the course of the action to an emotional wreck point where co-dependency reveals him to be a lost child. Emma Barclay, the younger sister who teeters between wo’ever and whatever on a fine line of irony, is also excellent. Her neediness is countered by subtly rendered reluctance to make herself vulnerable again to the people she loves and who have hurt her.
Marcus Graham has the unenviable task of a late-late entrance – when the dynamics and dramatics and blood-red characters have all been long established – yet his paralysed demeanour and Easter Island solemnity are perfect. He could be playing Edward VIII and just about to be ticked off by Wallis or Queen Mary, so painfully unable is he to deal with the messy relationships he created and abandoned.
And then there’s Susie Porter. Martha is a hellion. She is drug-addled, alcohol-sodden, utterly wilful, endlessly self indulgent and self-dramatising. She is also the saddest character on the stage and whichever demons she followed to reach the pit of despair she now inhabits, you know she will never escape them. She longs to be forgiven but does not know how to forgive. She longs for love but cannot truly give it. Tragically, she finally divines all of that and it’s probably too late. Porter’s central performance is physically and energetically sustained, finely calibrated, intelligently judged and emotionally honest to the point of skin-ripping pain on the part of the involved observer. It’s a remarkable achievement.
As already said, in bringing these warring elements together, Lee Lewis honours and understands the text and the humanity beneath it. The result is explosive and compelling – punctuated by laughter and tears. Her creatives are equally in tune: Brian Thomson’s simple white set – floor, large bed, walls – decorated with an anachronistic crystal chandelier (lighting Verity Hampson), suggests elegant opulence; but the detritus of alcoholic living skews the image. Alice Babidge’s costumes also ring the discordant notes heard in the text and production: all is not well, despite appearances. How many families know that thought?
Polly Stenham’s second play, Tusk Tusk will be staged by STC and ATYP from 13 August-4 September this year.
