Tusk Tusk at the Royal Court

Polly Stenham’s new play Tusk Tusk feels very much like a companion piece or even a prequel to her debut, the acclaimed That Face.

It's near impossible to discuss Stenham without making reference to her youth, to the fact that That Face was written when she was 19 and, that when it transferred from the Royal Court to the Duke of York’s Theatre, she became the youngest woman ever to have a play staged in the West End.

The pressure to produce a second play of similar power must have been intense and she has chosen not to move away from the subject matter that gave birth to That Face but to mine it further, to dig deeper into the same ground.

Both plays deal with emotional neglect and the complexities of child-parent relationships, the crucial difference being that while the figure of the mother dominated the first play – as the vampiric centre of her son’s life – here the mother, though still a potent force in her children’s lives, is an absence rather than a presence.

Eliot, Maggie and their little brother Finn have been left alone. They have just moved in to a new London flat and their possessions are all still packed up in boxes. It quickly becomes clear that they have no idea where their mother is or when she will come back. They keep watching their phones, hoping she will call. Such vanishings are, we soon gather, not entirely unusual and, initially at least, they remain confident she will return. Their aloneness soon becomes a kind of game: they sleep through the day, they eat Chinese take out for breakfast and they use what little money they have to buy a strobe light. Their plight brings to mind the adult-less world of numerous children’s books, though with the added 21st century shadow of social services separating them if they find out about the situation; at one point Maggie even comments that their lives have become like a bad Enid Blyton novel.

Eliot, the oldest at fifteen, clearly needs to believe that their mother will return and that nothing is really amiss. Whenever fourteen year old Maggie attempts to talk of their mother’s pill-popping, her depressions, her unreliability, he bats her words aside. His tie to his mother is obviously a complex, mutually needy one; beneath the nonchalance he seems far more dependent on her than his sister. In this way the family dynamics – the doted-on boy child, the daughter pushed to the side – mirror those of That Face, though here there is no chance of the father arriving white knight style at the end to rescue them, as he’s dead, carried off by cancer when they were young. “Fucking cliché,” as Eliot says. The only adults that puncture this world are the intensely middle-class Katie and Roland, friends of the children’s mother – but they bring with them their own set of complications.

Stenham’s play feels, if anything, more sure of itself than That Face. Though her teenage characters converse with a level of eloquence that at times borders on the implausible, she creates a world in which it is possible to accept that. The sparring between the two older siblings is sometimes uneasily flirtatious, sometimes stubborn and silly; but beneath their volleys of “arrows tipped with wit” there are things that don’t quite sit right, little niggles. For one thing, if there mother has been this unstable and unreliable all their lives, it seems odd that they wouldn’t be better able to fend for themselves, practically as well as emotionally.

And then there’s Cassie, the girl Eliot briefly dallies with, who it is immediately apparent is from a less well off background then the main characters. Though quite thinly sketched in comparison, she is an interesting addition, a more grounded individual who has a job, who supports herself. We never learn what absences she has in her life. But, though one can see why Stenham included her, she feels like something of an interloper, both into the siblings’ self-circling world and within the play itself.

In the end the play survives by the performances of the young cast (all roughly the same ages as their characters). And the three siblings, who are rarely off stage, are pretty amazing. Toby Regbo, as Eliot, mixes adolescent bravado and self conscious coolness with something more desperate and dangerous. Bel Powley, as Maggie, seems older than her years yet also endearingly childish at times. Finn Bennett as seven year old Finn feels utterly at home on the stage.

Though the early scenes, when it seems the play will just consist of sibling bickering, cause alarm bells to ring, the play soon becomes something bigger, darker and more compelling. It does however definitely gain something from watching it with That Face relatively fresh in the memory.

Reviewed for musicOMH

On The Face Of It

Whenever I suggest to my mother that she might like to accompany me to the theatre she always looks at me with a touch of anxiety in her eyes and asks: “how long is it?” It is only once she has been reassured that she can squeeze in a post-show drink and still be home in time for Newsnight, that she will then concede that, yes, she might quite like to come along.

This was the routine we went through when I mooted the idea of going to see Polly Stenham's That Face. And it was only once we'd established that it was a) less than ninety minutes long and b) that those minutes would not in any way feature Vanessa Redgrave talking about dead people (my mother was not overly enamoured with The Year Of Magical Thinking), that she tentatively agreed to the idea.

Written when she was just nineteen and originally staged in the Royal Court's 80-seat upstairs theatre, Stenham's play is about a supremely dyfunctional family. Actually dysfunctional doesn't come close to covering it. If there was a tick-list for how best to screw up your kids, every box would be filled in.

So we have a father who has run off to Hong Kong with a younger lover, leaving his former wife, Martha, to float around her bedroom in an increasingly grubby silk nightdress, swigging from a wine glass and indulging in disturbingly oedipal exchanges with her dutiful teenage son Henry. This boy is her world: she dotes on him, clings to him, calls him her 'little Russian soldier' and is fretful when he leaves her side. Her daughter Mia on the other hand, who is in trouble at her swish boarding school for dosing a classmate with Valium during a rather unpleasant initiation ritual, barely registers on Martha's radar.

Lindsay Duncan is as superb as everyone says as Martha, a woman blind to the fact that her behaviour is totally messing up her beloved son, while Matt Smith was also impressive as Henry. His was a difficult task, playing a character on the cusp of adulthood. The contrast between his taut toned physique and strange little-boy voice was striking and he even manages to pull off a scene where he has to have a complete emotional meltdown whilst wearing naught but a nightie and a string of pearls.

Though Stenham knows how to write scenes of emotional intensity, That Face is undoubtedly the work of a young person. Things frequently escalate to a hysterical pitch and the final scene is incredibly over the top. On more than one occasion it veered into Ab Fab territory, albeit with a more poignant edge, and if Joanna Lumley had floated in from the wings, hair bee-hived and ciggie in hand, it wouldn't have felt too out of place. The play did keep me gripped, despite the fact that I found these people – and their world of bitterness and privilege – so devoid of warmth, so unpleasant, that it was difficult to care overly about them. I know that's point: that Martha's extreme behaviour has left little room for normal human emotions, that damage begets damage, but I found the poisonousness of all concerned difficult to take. Again I suspect that is intended, but as a result I found the play easier to admire than enjoy.

That Face has been lauded in some corners perhaps more than is necessary, but it is still a taut, compelling piece of work. And my mother's verdict? "Not bad at all," which is actually pretty high praise by her standards.

Afterwards we headed for a nearby bar for the requisite post-play drink. Topics for discussion over said drink: Did Matt Smith have some sort of special wee-machine under his nightie or was he doing a Jane Horrocks? We presumed the former. Also, was the large, unkempt double bed that dominated Mike Britton’s set a visual reference to Tracey Emin’s bed? And were the increasing quantities of detritus, torn paper, clothes and whatnot, that Martha flung about the set a metaphor for the mess of the characters’ emotional landscapes? Or something. Maybe. Either way my mother, who abhors mess and who used to flinch in near physical pain if I so much as left a stray sock on the floor, was itching to get up there and have a good tidy. Lastly we both agreed that we were very, very glad indeed that neither of us had been to boarding school, as Stenham made it appear plausibly hellish.