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Tuesday, 18 May 2010
UPDATE: The Observer's Hermione Hoby
interviews Polly Stenham on the New York opening of her first play here.
The Manhattan Theatre Club production of
Polly Stenham's That Face, directed by Sarah Benson, is
currently in previews, and should be an interesting test-case
scenario in the recent London/New York debates that surrounded
Enron's failure on Broadway. Stenham's first play, written when
she was 19 years old, was nominated for one of Britain's highest honors,
the Olivier Award, and according to Alison Croggon's recent review of the Melbourne, Australia, premiere, the
play has a
particularly British perspective:
There's an unspoken history [lying beneath the play] that
is still playing out in Britain. In his unfond memoir of his prep school
St Cyprians, George Orwell described the brutalities of his middle class
boarding school as a training ground for the front troops of Empire,
fostering the lack of empathy and Darwinian competitiveness necessary for
ordering around, and possibly shooting, the brown people who lived in the
pink bits of the map. Another association, more telling perhaps in its
poignancy, is from Michael Apted's 7-Up series: the unhappy
middle class teenager Suzy, devastated by her parents' divorce,
introvertedly twirling her hair as her pet dog chases and kills a rabbit
in the background.
This resonance simply doesn't translate to Australia: yes,
we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here. We
might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they
don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently
director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with
Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family
psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the
unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the
diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian
accents.
Will it be perceived as "an enclosed family psychodrama" here, whatever
the accents that Benson decides upon? Maybe. And though Alison points out
that
the play's power rests in "its precise observations of a family locked in
the crisis of mental illness," you won't find that in the publicity
materials for the MTC production, which describe the play's plot as "a powerful and darkly
comic look at an affluent family in freefall. Mia has been suspended from
boarding school. Her brother, Henry, has dropped out altogether. And
Martha, their mum, manipulates them all. Money can no longer fix their
problems — now it's up to them" — not a mention of mental
illness to be found (or, for that matter, class upheaval, though there's
the glamour of money to be sure) and more, indeed, an "enclosed family
psychodrama" among the affluent. Never mind the director; the press
material has it simplified from the start. Is the play's Martha a "a
fragile, damaged creature teetering wildly on the edge of a catastrophe
curve," as Alison describes her, or a "Real Housewife of Contemporary Great Britain"? Is
there a significant difference? The production will tell.
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Superfluities
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