Polly Stenham was 20 when her first play That Face debuted at the Royal Court Theatre (Picture: Johan Persson)

Playwright Polly Stenham became the toast of the Royal Court Theatre when she was just 20 years old, thanks to her acclaimed debut effort That Face. She tells Metro about her meteoric rise to fame and her return to the Royal Court with her new play No Quarter.

During the West End run of her debut play, That Face, Polly Stenham would sit in the café opposite the Duke Of York’s Theatre. ‘And just watch the people come out, you know?’ she says. ‘I thought: “This will never feel normal. It’s amazing.” So I look back on that time and think, yikes. I’m glad I made it through relatively unscathed. Because that s*** can go really wrong. And it nearly did.’



Stenham was 20 when That Face premiered at The Royal Court and 21 when it hit the West End. A blazing portrait of a rich, queasily dysfunctional family, That Face scooped a host of awards and turned Stenham, now 26, into a theatrical sensation. This she seized on enthusiastically, being regularly photographed hanging out with a hip crowd that included Doctor Who actor Matt Smith and the Treadaway twins; she’s also good friends with Florence Welch. ‘All those parties. It got really messy for a while…’

Two years later, she bounced back with Tusk Tusk, which also picked up good reviews. ‘Which was a relief, because after the hype I thought people could really come after me,’ she says.


Now, after a frustrating gestation via adapting Tusk Tusk for Channel 4 and a wasted detour into a play with songs, she’s back with play number three, No Quarter.

‘Although this has been the hardest to write, I don’t feel the panic to prove I mean it any more,’ she says. ‘By play number three you stop being the ingénue, which I’m really up for. You enter the middle rank, where I’ll probably stay forever,’ she adds.

Stenham describes No Quarter as the last in a trilogy about growing up. That Face blew the lid off middle-class parenting, with its prescription-drug-addict mother helplessly dependent on her 18-year-old son. Tusk Tusk was about young three siblings left home alone and desperately trying to maintain the illusion of normality. Stenham doesn’t want to reveal the script for No Quarter but it’s a fair guess it will explore adolescence as a time of pain and abandonment, along with more obviously political questions about accountability.

She has always resisted attempts to cast her plays as even faintly autobiographical, even though her parents divorced when she was young and, like the character Mia in That Face, she spent several years at boarding school. Her childhood, she insists, was fine – furthermore, she spent a fair bit accompanying her beloved father to the theatre; he died just after the Court accepted That Face.

‘I refuse to talk about my personal life because I think this cult of celebrity and obsession with the person behind the thing can really obscure the work,’ she says. ‘Also, as a woman, you have to be that bit more angry or convincing or damaged. I get a lot of “oh, did that happen to you?” – and that f***s me off.’



Stenham appears old and young at the same time. She oozes street-wise confidence; she has a handshake to break a man; two years ago she opened a gallery with her best friend in Camden. Yet there’s a softness and a wide-eyed idealism in there too, mixed with a good dose of generational anger.

‘All that bohemian crap that’s left us with this scenario, with the economy and the climate,’ she says. ‘The child-parent relationship in No Quarter is more of a political metaphor for two generations and the choice of my generation whether to repeat the mistakes or to change. I mean, everything is really scary and we’re all just sleepwalking. We’re like in the last two minutes of the rave before the lights come up.’

She worries whether being a playwright is enough.

‘I’m basically just w***ing about in front of middle-class people who afterwards can have a nice glass of wine. It’s incredibly indulgent.’ Yet she also adores the theatre. ‘I love the tickets, the rustling, the fact it’s live. I’d be crap at any other job. To be honest, it’s a very exciting time to be alive. To be a writer.’

No Quarter previews from tomorrow and opens next Wed, Royal Court Theatre. www.royalcourttheatre.com

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