‘We are the people our parents warned us against’ was a slogan painted on walls in the seventies, but now that particular ‘we’ has turned into the people their children need to be warned against. Polly Stenham’s That Face, written when she was nineteen, and premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, dealt with a druggy, alcoholic mother abandoned by her businessman husband for a younger woman, and the two adolescent children who have to cope with the fall-out. Her second play, Tusk Tusk, also staged at the Royal Court, similarly tackles the collateral damage to adolescents by adults who have refused to become adults and continue to Peter Pan it into middle age.
     Eliot, aged fifteen (Toby Regbo), Maggie, fourteen (Bel Powley) and Finn, seven (Finn Bennett or Austin Moulton) are waiting in the flat they’ve just moved to for their mother to turn up or to ring them on one of their mobile phones. Suffering from a mixture of what sounds like manic depression, drugginess and self-indulgence, she has often disappeared before, and, it turns out, has been several times rescued from suicide by Maggie. Waiting for mum, unlike waiting for Godot, involves more than mere existentialist game-playing and fencing with time. It involves surviving without anyone knowing they are there (for what the children dread is being split up and taken into care), being ‘hunter gatherers’ that go out to buy food (mostly crisps) at night.
     Given the age of dramatist and performers, this is an astoundingly good play, and extraordinarily well acted. It has, however, the vices of its virtues. Pertinent and moving, demonstrating that deprivation is not just a matter of poverty, lamenting the decline of 1960s liberation, optimism and experimentation into dissipation and morbidity, it sometimes threatened to become sentimental and arch. The self-aware dialogue of intelligent adolescents, so accurately echoed, was sometimes precious and irritating. It was absolutely right that the children would see themselves from the outside as courageous waifs, could be assumed to have read Lord of the Flies and Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, but it meant that protagonists and playwright were almost too knowing in their efforts to wring the audience’s hearts. All the same, Eliot waiting for his mother to turn up on his sixteenth birthday, and the wonderfully charted spats and loyalties of close siblings, brilliantly succeeded in being heart-wringing.
Jane O'Grady