The subject and target of British playwright Polly Stenham’s play ‘That Face’ is a dysfunctional family, leaving a portrait that sends chills up one’s spine.

At the centre of Stenham’s family’s dysfunction is mother Martha (Susie Porter). Suffering from mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction, it only seems to be a matter of time before she will have to return to hospital. Martha is inappropriately ‘leaning on’ her house-bound adolescent son Henry (Kenji Fitzgerald) to protect her. This causes a dreadful and dangerous see-saw of co-dependency.

Martha’s husband, wealthy businessman Hugh (Marcus Graham), has left her to live in Hong Kong and has married a much younger woman. Their daughter Mia (Emily Barclay) has been shuffled off to an elite boarding school.

Things come to a head after Mia is expelled from school after having been ‘charged’, together with girlfriend Izzy (Krew Boylan), of drugging and torturing a fellow student, Alice (Laura Hopkinson). Hugh flies back home to try and rescue the situation only to find his family in a state of complete uproar.

‘That Face’ is about how far, and how terribly, things can go wrong! It’s rare to see such vulnerability exposed on stage.

Marcus Graham’s suave, handsome Hugh has to face the music after having, long ago, put his family in the ‘too hard basket’. Susie Porter’s Martha is a bundle of insecurities and expletives that she recklessly heaps on her son. In one shocking scene she shreds all his clothes into tiny strips. The malicious behaviour of Emily Barclay’s Mia towards Alice stems from the neglect that she has experienced from both her parents.

And at the centre of the drama, the primary victim, is Henry. At way too early an age he has become his mother’s carer. His fragile young life has been cruelly skewered by his mother’s out of control behaviour. As the play comes to a close the stage moves inevitably from a battlefield to a wasteland. The scenes with Henry, his mother’s little soldier,desperately clinging onto his mother, are heartbreaking.

‘That Face’, in a production well directed by Lee Lewis and staged by Brian Thomson, is superbly played by the cast. This is one family that one does not survive intact. ‘That Face’ plays upstairs at Belvoir Street until the 14th March, 2010.