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Reader rating
Dir: Jeremy Herrin.
Cast: Lindsay Duncan, Matt Smith, Hannah Murray, Catherine Steadman, Julian Wadham
Description: Lindsay Duncan and Matt Smith play mother and son in Polly Stenham's acclaimed debut play about a wealthy family experiencing the downside of life. Directed by Jeremy Herrin.
Trains: Tube: Leicester Square/Charing Cross 
Phone: 0870060 6623
Website: www.theambassadors.com/dukeofyorks
Superlative: Lindsay Duncan as mother Martha and Matt Smith as her disturbed son Henry on stage at the Duke of York's
Playwright Polly Stenham, right, with Hannah Murray (Mia) at the first-night party
A teenage boy, attired in a woman’s night-dress, a necklace and excessive lipstick, crouches by a bed on which his drunken mother sprawls. She is lost to the psycho-drama of her son, who is going out of his mind as surely as she has already gone from hers. His father and sister stand watching, like impassive spectators at a street accident. Voice, pitched screaming distress, limbs and nerves jangling, the boy rages, begs and accuses. Thanks to the award-winning author, 21-year-old Polly Stenham, and Matt Smith’s astonishing coup de theatre as the teenage Henry, guilty feelings are expressed with devastating impact.
This scene marks the climax and resolution of Miss Stenham’s That Face, premiered at the Royal Court, and which won her the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright award last year. It generates such emotional power because it faces up unflinchingly to the consequences of a mother/son incestuous bond. This is the first play on the subject by an English author since Noel Coward’s more oblique treatment in The Vortex. It has the strange, uncomfortable ring of truth about it. Incest becomes the defining symptom of a rich, privileged, middle-class family in crisis and dysfunctional collapse.
The crisis is precipitated when Henry’s demure but under-characterised sister Mia (Hannah Murray) leads a school dormitory initiation ceremony, which with the aid of her mother’s pilfered Valium requires the victim’s hospitalisation. Julian Wadham’s bored, introverted father is called home from the Far East and a new marriage to deal with the family he would prefer to forget.
Although the dormitory incident beggars belief, betraying Stenham’s immaturity, she handles the incest theme with assurance. In Jeremy Herrin’s powerful, expressionistic production, a centre-stage bed is the single stage property. Here lies Henry’s mother, Lindsay Duncan’s Martha, a glazed alcoholic and blanched, petulant blonde, with something of several Tennessee Williams heroines about her.
In spellbinding scenes that steer a wavering line between black comedy and a drama of erotic possessiveness, the superlative, mocking Duncan, keeps Smith’s protective, guilt-laden Henry to heel and in bed, until he escapes for a first night with a girl. Martha’s jealous responses to her son’s bid for freedom, comic and dreadful, seal their fates. Matt Smith’s virtuoso performance makes it clear that Henry’s life rather than Martha’s has been ruined.
Information: 0870 060 1483. Booking to 5 July.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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I was truly blown away by this play. Forget it was written by a 19 year old. That did not matter. It simply made it all the more incredible. Lindsay Duncan was extraordinary as the boozy Mother hell bent on keeping hold of Henry her son in her clutches. Matt Smith's performance of the son trying to protect his Mother from the world, at the same time as trying to make a life for himself was truly superb. 90 minutes, it could have been a six hour epic, such was the width and breadth and depth of what the play covered.
- Roger Goldsmith, Southsea, Hants
