Polly Stenham’s play That Face (2007) and Tennessee Williams

Simon Edge in The Daily Express in 2008 compared Polly Stenham to Tennessee Williams, a playwright that I have a particular fondness for in part because he is brilliant at constructing dark naturalist plays where you still somehow feel sympathetic towards the wounded agents that populate the stage. (I use the term agents rather than characters because I like to pay homage to Aristotle who actually distinguished character as the moral facet of the agents and distinguished it from their relationship to Thought and diction. This distinction is useful in thinking about dramatis personae and how they are scripted and eventually come alive on stage). I am also partial to Williams for a more personal reason; my grandfather’s brother, Sven Barthel, was responsible for the first translations of Williams into Swedish.

The most recent Williams play that I have seen performed was Sweet Bird of Youth in 2013 with Kim Cattrall as the fading actress Alexandra del Lago at London’s Old Vic Theatre. It was directed by Marion Elliott. Cattrall evoked both the lost glamour, a wry humor and a strong sense of desperation in her performance and had good – as in an appropriately tension-laden – chemistry with Seth Numrich who played Chance Wayne, the wannabe actor. The mixture of attraction, fear and contempt between them brought Williams’ words to life. It was a memorable evening. 

Like so many of Williams’ plays, Sweet Bird of Youth (written in 1959) is built on a tableau of dreams set against the harshness of reality, aging and mortality. Yet, in the midst of that there is a respect in his scripts for the fragility of dreams and the desire to protect oneself against their loss – even as that protection is itself sometimes self-destructive. It would be better to give up on the illusion or delusion and get on with life, yet Williams seems to ask, who is brave enough to do that? The fear that there is nothing outside the shell of the illusion of a past or future happiness created by dreams is very real in his plays. It is at their core and makes his agents, his dramatis personae, very human.

So back to Stenham.That Face was first performed in London in the spring of 2007 in a production at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Jeremy Herrin and staged again in 2008 but this time at the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End. It was hugely successful and made the then 19-year old Stenham a name in modern British theatre. It is a play about a divorced couple where the man has left the family and England to live with his younger wife and new child. The mother is an alcoholic and drug addict in a downward spiral holding on for dear life to her son, Henry. Henry has quit school to stay home and take care of her but is more enabling than helpful. Mia, his sister, is away at boarding school but acting out and it is her actions that cause the house of cards where everyone has illusions of control to come tumbling down. The father has to return to England and sort things out, but, of course he no longer has any real relationship with his children. No one’s carefully constructed reality can remain the same when what is actually going on has to be faced. That’s the play, and it is a very well-constructed modern family drama. What makes it live is the subtext of emotional and psychological pain and desperation.

I am not sure what Simon Edge saw in That Face that reminded him of Williams, but the links that I see between That Face and this canonic American playwright are to be found in this subtext and in the construction of a façade that is more about preserving one’s own illusions than fooling anyone else. Her play is thus also structurally similar to Williams’ in that there is an inevitable eventual painful confrontation with reality.