On the occasion of Polly Stenham’s
second play
Tusk Tusk in
2009, and her second (following her acclaimed debut at the age of 19
with
That Face) to deal with
teenagers coping with unreliable, unstable and/or downright absent
parents, I opined that “for whatever reason(s), we are all on
tenterhooks for Stenham’s third play.” That caveat was because it was
hard to avoid the inference (though harder to express it tactfully)
that Stenham seemed as though she might be compulsively working out
personal issues onstage. If anything, that awkward sensation
intensifies now that that third play has arrived.
No Quarter, staged as Stenham
is 26, centres on a 24-year-old protagonist who begins in a similar
situation, but it develops into an account of his coming to terms (or
not) with the loss of both parents. Once again the principal characters
are drawn from the social ranks of the comfortably well off, although
as individuals they may (as with central character Robin) be
comparatively impoverished. The playwright, who lives in a large house
in a kind of artistic colony, has set her latest play in a large
country house filled with artistic disarray; the university dropout’s
protagonist is a music-school dropout. His nearest friends include a
pair of twins, albeit a non-identical brother/sister pair unlike actors
Luke and Harry Treadaway who are close associates of Stenham (though
neither appears in Jeremy Herrin’s production).
As in her previous plays,
No Quarter
contains a sibling relationship with the younger member being far more
of a loose cannon. The two new elements are the aforementioned sense of
bereavement and its consequences, with a character having no choice but
to face the world alone, and a deal of onstage argument about the
social responsibility of the wealthy dilettante. Tom Sturridge sets out
to make Robin magnetic without being likeable: he succeeds in the
latter aim but not the former. A succession of other characters serve
only to display and then interrogate Robin’s personality.
In many ways, it is ultimately irrelevant whether or not Stenham is
mining a vein of deep personal preoccupation; after all, Tennessee
Williams kept returning to the same themes too. What is salient is the
extent to which she can make these themes speak to and for others. On
that point, I fear the benefit of the doubt has run out.
Written for the Financial
Times.