On a dreary Sunday afternoon in January, I was fortunate enough to sit down with some of the creatives behind Fourth Wall’s upcoming production ‘That Face’ during their final rehearsal before production week. Director Ellie Kinch and actors Alice Toner (playing Mia) and Benedict Porter (playing Henry) kindly talked me through the process of putting on Polly Stenham’s hit debut play.
The story follows 15-year-old Mia who is expelled from boarding school after a drug-fuelled hazing ritual goes too far. At home, she is forced to confront her substance-abusing mother Martha who is looked after by Mia’s older brother Henry. Mia’s expulsion also leads to the return of Mia and Henry’s distant father Hugh who must confront his ex-wife and the family he has neglected. The play is a scorching dissection of a privileged yet deeply flawed family and how parents traumatise their children.
PD: Ellie – there are some very emotionally harrowing scenes in the play for all the characters and heavy themes like drug abuse and parental neglect. How did you go about creating a rehearsal space that was safe for the actors?
EK: Well, I just wanted to be very open. I didn’t want to do anything that people weren’t comfortable with, so throughout the process I’ve been questioning if they’re comfortable doing this and obviously if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter. It can be cut from the show. My priority is – this is a Durham Student Theatre production. I want everyone to feel safe and if there’s something they don’t want to do that’s absolutely fine and I do not mind because at the end of the day it’s a great script. If we take parts out of it, I don’t mind.
PD: So, Alice, you play Mia and I think she definitely is one of the funnier, snarkier characters in the play while also being vulnerable, especially being the youngest character. How did you go about trying to get across playing a child who acts older than her years and balancing both her snarky humour and her sensitivity?
AT: I think mostly trying to figure out what she’s been through in life. I think understanding her upbringing and her relationships within her family give an indication as to how she would act. The fact that she is older than her years – I think it’s a trauma response to what she’s been through, and I think to understand the character you have to understand what she’s been through and how she responds to it. So I’ve done a lot of character work and thinking about her upbringing and what it was probably like losing her dad at about ten, and memories of being parented by a single mum who was abusing substances and preferred her brother and really trying to understand how that would feel.
PD: Yeah, that makes sense. And Benedict you play Henry and he’s a really devastating role. He’s the protector figure for both Martha and Mia but is also very easily manipulated and by the end of the play regresses to a sort of infantile state. So how did you go about trying to balance his deep empathy and vulnerability with being the protector figure as well?
BP: I think in a similar vein it’s sort of like creating context to the character and the motivations. I think it’s viewing Henry as someone who tries to do these things but just lacks the skills and means because of his upbringing. He has to leave school and know how to deal with these things, but he is only 18. He’s still really a child, or teenager at least. Having to deal with so many different things, you know, the father leaving, and I think he seems to know a little bit more. He’s been privy to the conversations between his parents when they have their arguments as well as being Martha’s primary caretaker and also dealing with Mia when she rebels at school. I think it’s like an immense, multifaceted pressure that chips and chips and chips away until there’s a complete crumbling of the character.
PD: Definitely and, because of these intense themes, there’s a risk of going into melodrama with the execution of it. So how did you find tackling these really serious topics but also making sure it felt rooted in a truth and reality?
EK: I think the main thing is letting everyone, all the actors, kind of take their own lead on it. The character work I think is so important. People being able to understand their characters fully so they can portray them in an accurate way. Also sticking to it being an extremely naturalistic play in most of the scenes. Scene 1 is slightly different, but the other scenes are very raw. So that’s kind of how I wanted these scenes to come about. Not melodramatic.
AT: Also not forcing any of the comedy. Any moments that could be comic will be received that way by an audience, and we aren’t pushing for them to be comedic. If a character says something that’s in the script that is supposed to be comedic, that’ll come across and if it doesn’t come across then the character isn’t pushing for it to be funny in that moment.
BP: I think there’s so many really tender moments as well. Like there are these big, extreme high points and low points I suppose, but there are a lot of individual really tender moments between characters.
EK: Especially between your characters.
BP: Yeah, especially between us. There’s a lot of moments of looking out for each other, and genuine love and showing that, juxtaposing that alongside these higher moments, I think is really important. It’s not all on the same extreme level, there are certain peaks and troughs.
PD: Amazing. Okay and for my final question – is there anything in particular you want audiences to take away from watching ‘That Face’?
EK: I mean there’s so much I want everyone to take away from it. I guess a big theme in it is: don’t underestimate what happens behind closed doors in a person. Especially at university when you don’t know other people so well and don’t know what they’ve been through – just always look out for the people you know, and you never know what they’re going through.
‘That Face’ is performing in the Collingwood Arts Centre from 22nd-24th January at 7:30pm. Tickets are available here: https://www.durhamstudenttheatre.org/whats-on/that-face
Image: Pearl D’souza