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 ...