Theatre review: That Face / Duke of York's, London (original) (raw)

Forget all the hype about Polly Stenham, at 21, being the youngest West End debutant since Christopher Hampton.

What matters is that her 90-minute play, first seen at the Royal Court Theatre, has a quality of emotional desperation one more often associates with mature American dramatists like Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee than with cool young Brits. This is also one of the first English-language plays I can recall to deal explicitly with mother-son incest. At the centre of the action lies a bed patently occupied by the alcoholic, pill-popping Martha and her 18-year-old son, Henry. Abandoned by her Hong Kong-based ex-husband, Martha looks to Henry to be a mixture of lover, nurse and playmate. The threatened expulsion of daughter Mia from her posh school for complicity in torturing and drugging a classmate sends the children's father, Hugh, scuttling home to sort out one of the worst family messes since those troubles in Sophoclean Thebes.

Stenham strikes me as stronger on the symptoms of moral chaos than its causes. She never makes fully clear what has turned Martha into a psychological wreck. Lurking is an assumption that Hugh, who abandoned Martha for a Chinese mistress, is somehow the guilty party. But since the accusations come largely from Martha, at best an unreliable witness, I wasn't sure whether Stenham was attacking the destruction of the nuclear family or a class system that turns women like Martha into victims.

Stenham's god-given gift, however, is an ability to communicate pain and longing. The most moving aspect of the play is Martha's morbid fixation with her son. Lindsay Duncan brings to the role a blanched beauty and dreamy sensuality so that when, gazing at the bed, she says "I promise never again", you know it is a vow she will never keep. Duncan's brilliance is matched by Matt Smith whose hapless Henry is both one of those whom Oedipus wrecks and a residual snob who greets his returning father with "you reek of duty-free". Jeremy Herrin's admirably spartan production, deftly designed by Mike Britton, contains highly accomplished performances from Hannah Murray as the casually sadistic Mia and Julian Wadham as the defective dad.

· Until July 5. Box office: 0208 544 7404.