Dysfunctional families are hard to avoid. They fill the square mile settings of every soap opera. Books about them have their own dedicated section in WHSmiths. They’re woven into most of the WWE’s plotlines.
And yet somehow, at just 20-years-old, Polly Stenham managed to write something far greater than a compelling play about any old delicate domestic situation. That Face is a snapshot of a family who are emblematic of the way in which being a part of the privileged upper-middle class can distort perspectives and twist moralities.
Martha is a drunk, sheltering from the sober world outside. She has trapped her all-too-loyal son/carer Henry indoors with her. Her daughter Mia meanwhile, is confined within her boarding school, where she has joined a narrow clique of vicious dormitory tyrants.
But now Mia faces being kicked out of school – and her father is returning from his new family in Hong Kong to find that his old one has completely broken down.
The play won widespread acclaim when it debuted in 2007. Now, as it makes its regional premiere at The Crucible under the direction of Richard Wilson, it’s easy to see why. It captures something deeply profound about modern times – that we are all isolated, even if we’re wealthy – encases it in bitterness, confusion and resentment, flicks a lit match at it and watches it deform and disintegrate relationships and individuals.
Such an ambitious allegory couldn’t be carried without a cast of intensely focussed performers, and this production does not disappoint. Frances Barber’s Martha is subtly sinister as she manages, brilliantly, to be on the verge of ecstasy and hysteria at once. James Norton’s portrayal of Henry depicts an unwavering devotion to Martha that is entirely unsettling, and only becomes more so as he loses grip on his sanity.
As Mia, Leila Mimmack shows astonishing versatility, as she slips from heartless bully to snotty adolescent to vulnerable teenager. When she snaps at her mother in the play’s climatic scene, it feels as though a hand grenade has gone off on stage.
The stage itself rotates, and with a set made of sliding panels, this adds scope to That Face’s message. It gives the issues that it raises the geographical space to be fully explored.
But it is the way that those issues are laid bare that makes this play truly exceptional. It does what all great art should, by helping us to better understand an incredibly precise, enormously distressing and worryingly modern aspect of human nature.
That Face runs at The Crucible until Saturday 24 July: www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk