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This is much less major than the size of my name on the posters might make you
think,” says Polly Stenham, with a likeable but misplaced modesty. The
critical acclaim and clutch of prizes that the 21-year-old won with her
debut play, That Face, when it was produced at the Royal Court last year
might reasonably be called major, as might the sellout audiences it
attracted, which included Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and the National’s
Nicholas Hytner. Then there’s the fact that she has become one of the
youngest playwrights to see her work transfer to the West End. But well
earned though the big red letters of Stenham’s name on billboards may be,
they aren’t going to her head. “Mad,” she mutters.
Stenham looks as if she has stepped out of a sixth-form common room as she
sits in a cafe opposite the theatre where her play opened last week and
admires that typeface. With a bleached-blonde pixie haircut, in a holey,
oversized woolly jumper, she speaks with the faint mockney twang of posh but
savvy public-school kids such as Lily Allen, peppering her sentences with
likes, y’knows and expletives. Smiley and unpretentious, she doesn’t try to
hide her nerves or excitement, describing opening night as “50% like
Christmas and 50% like an exam”.
She emphasises her luck in finding herself in the right place at the right
time. Having put in the hours as a skivvy at various studio theatres while
studying English at University College London, she joined the Royal Court’s
young writers programme and set out to skewer the squalor and misery
possible within well-heeled upper-middle-class families like her own. Her
aims coincided with the agenda of the Royal Court’s new artistic director,
Dominic Cooke, who arrived in 2006 determined to shake off the theatre’s
reputation for gritty dramas about working-class gloom, and championed That
Face, the first complete piece Stenham had written.
Lucky timing doesn’t, however, explain away the success of her snappily
written, tragi-comic portrait of a rich but wretched family in which the
absent father sends cheques as a substitute for emotional support. The
alcoholic mother, Martha, dotes rather too heavily on her teenage son,
Henry, while their daughter, Mia, is on the brink of expulsion after
drugging a younger girl with mummy’s Valium during a brutal boarding-school
initiation rite. None of the characters is placed clearly in the right or
the wrong, and every role is meaty enough to have attracted what Stenham
calls “a luxury cast”, including the Olivier-winning Lindsay Duncan as
Martha, the rising star Matt Smith, from Party Animals, as Henry, and Hannah
Murray, from the yoof TV drama Skins, as Mia.
The play’s opening scene shows Mia and a schoolmate tormenting another girl in
their dorm, egging each other on until their victim has to be hospitalised.
Sent to board at Wycombe Abbey and Rugby from the age of 11, Stenham insists
that, although the events in her play are fictional, they don’t exaggerate
what went on after lights-out. “Stuff like that did happen. Full stop,” she
says. “I think I got off pretty lightly myself - I wasn’t alpha, but I
wasn’t bottom of the pile, either, and I enjoyed school, at least in
retrospect. But some of my most amazing male friends at Rugby, really gentle
boys, did some wrong stuff to other boys, involving cupboards and deodorant
cans and rope, when they were about 15. And it’s not just my schools - I’ve
heard horror stories of what went down at Uppingham or Roedean or wherever.
The teachers do everything they can to stop it, but if you put that many
kids together, it’s going to turn into Lord of the Flies. And it’s only
afterwards, when you start chatting about it to people who didn’t go to
boarding school, that you realise that kind of thing isn’t normal.”
The bullies in Stenham’s play use a beanie hat to blindfold their victim, a
deliberate visual reference to the photos of hooded inmates under
interrogation that emerged from Guantanamo Bay. “I’m fascinated by how
institutions can turn into little worlds of their own – whether it’s
schools, families or the army. In your own world, the rules might be
different. I can understand how these sorts of things could end up seeming
all right, whether it’s in a prison or in a school: someone above you said
it was fine, everyone else is doing it, it gives you back a little bit of
control when you’re in hell, and, actually, it might be f***ing fun while
you’re doing it.”
The dysfunctional family at the heart of Stenham’s play is, she insists, pure
fiction. Although her parents divorced, and she has little contact with her
mother, she and her younger sister had a happy, loving upbringing with their
late father, the Unilever tycoon Anthony “Cob” Stenham. It was Cob - who
chaired various arts organisations, including the RCA and the ICA - who
introduced his daughter to the theatre. “Going to plays was something dad
and I did together from when I was pretty young. We went to the Royal Court,
the Arcola - all over the place - to see plays by Pinter and Sarah Kane and
all sorts of things. I remember seeing this crazy play full of infidelity
and violence at the Bush when I was about 10, and thinking, ‘This is really
weird, but brilliant.’ So I had an idea of how a play worked from seeing so
many. It would be a lie to say I just switched off my Nintendo Wii and wrote
one.”
Cob didn’t live to see his daughter’s play performed. Already in late middle
age when he became a father, he died in 2006, aged 74. Stenham is composed
while discussing his death: “It’s an enormous happiness to me that I found
out the play was actually going to be put on, the day before he died. If it
had happened the day after, I’d have been really gutted - the Royal Court
would have called me up and I’d have been, like, ‘Thanks, but I don’t really
care.’ I don’t think he thought the play was that good when he read it.
Being a clever, strict dad, he was, like, ‘Well, it’s not bad.’ But he was
pleased to know it was going to be staged, and that means a lot to me. We
had an amazing relationship - there was nothing left unsaid. So, when he
died, even when I was as upset about it as I was, it felt and still feels
weirdly natural. This has happened to so many people, and it will pass.”
After getting the two pieces of news, however, Stenham decided to abandon her
degree. “I was sitting in a lecture and I thought, ‘I can’t stand this, I’ll
have to leave.’ I had to deal with dad’s death and his estate, and the play
would have been on around the time of my second-year exams. I would rather
do one thing really well than lots of things badly, so I decided to just do
the play. And UCL has told me I can more or less come back whenever I want.”
Having had a second play commissioned by the Royal Court, and been awarded
£15,000 by the UK Film Council to adapt That Face for the big screen,
Stenham seems unlikely to be returning to university any time soon. Her next
play will be based in a similar world to That Face, she says, but beyond
that, she’s staying tight-lipped. “I don’t want to jinx it - it could be
complete rubbish. I’m aware that it’s never going to be as easy as That Face
again - this has been a wet dream of a result. There’s going to be a lot of
hard work and probably disappointment ahead, but you can’t let yourself
freak out about it. The truth is, I’ve no idea what’s going on - all I know
is that right now I’m having a f***ing great time.”
That Face, Duke of York’s, WC2
The critics’ opinions
‘One of the most astonishing debuts I have seen in more than 30 years of
theatre reviewing’ Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph
‘Polly Stenham is 20, but her first play has a disconcerting maturity’ John
Peter, The Sunday Times
‘Stenham is the star of the show, offering up a script that is moving,
realistic and shot through with a macabre, knowing humour’ Tim
Auld, Seven
‘This domestic nightmare, with its adolescent panic and rage, touches a nerve’ Kate
Bassett, Independent on Sunday
‘Never has a play had an apter name: That Face is gob-smacking’ Susannah
Clapp, The Observer
