Friday 10 April 2009

Tusk Tusk **** TNT

Thursday 09 April 2009 14:54 GMT

I’m getting really worried about 22 year old Polly Stenham. She first hit the headlines a couple of years ago with her coruscating drama of dysfunctional middle-class family life, That Face. Written when she was still a teenager, it won her a clutch of awards and a West End transfer, but it also suggested intimate knowledge of an affluent but far from happy upbringing.

Her new play revisits much of the same territory – absent father (this time through cancer rather than lifestyle choice), a mother whose prescription drug and drink habit has rendered her essentially unfit for purpose, and articulate teenage children home alone trying to cope against the odds. One can only hope that the disturbing scenarios she so skilfully depicts aren’t too rooted in autobiography.

Maggie, Eliot and seven-year-old Finn have just moved to London, but their mother has walked out the door and they haven’t seen her since. With unopened packing cases still littering the flat, Maggie senses that this time it’s different and she’s not coming back, whilst Eliot refuses to believe that she won’t return for his 16th birthday just a few days away.
Stenham’s dialogue fizzes with energy and mounting panic, with black humour as well as pain, and her young cast gives absolutely knockout performances - little Finn Bennett’s cheeky Finn, tutored in evasive lies, Toby Regbo’s Eliot, forced by default into the role of head of the household and desperate to keep their fragmenting family together, and Bel Powley’s 14 year old Maggie, a child growing up far too fast and already weary of the unasked for responsibilities foisted on her by their habitually A.W.O.L. mother.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1 (020 7565 5000) until 2nd May (£15- £10)

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