

That Face
Polly Stenham is so famous for writing her debut play aged 19, that it sometimes feels like it’s become subliminally accepted that her youth was the reason ‘That Face’ was so successful. Was its West End-storming success purely industry excitement at her youth? No! I recently saw a revival of another zeitgeisty ‘00s smash, ‘God of Carnage’, and it had very clearly lost its edge with the passage of time. By contrast, ‘That Face’ still feels like a sharp knife to the guts. It’s a howl of betrayal, a dark comedy about two teenagers all but abandoned by their narcissistic mother and wealthy father, an attack on posh parenting by somebody barely older than her protagonists Mia and Henry. The fact it’s somewhat autobiographical certainly gives it an added punch. But ‘That Face’ isn’t good just because it has the rawness of personal experience. It’s also beautifully structured, a perfect weighted balance of comedy and tragedy. It begins at a girls’ boarding school, where Mia (Ruby Stokes) and her performatively posh, vaguely sinister friend Izzy (Sarita Gabony) are inflicting a hazing ritual upon their new dorm mate. But a giggling Mia has fed the young girl a massive dose of Prozac that she’s swiped off her mum… as it dawns on Izzy how serious this is, they enter panic mode. So far, so ‘Mean Girls’, but when a suspended Mia turns up at the flat her brother Henry (Kasper Hilton-Hille) and mother Martha (Niamh Cusack) live in, it puts a new spin on things. Martha is a mess, estrange