Seven years ago, I described Niamh Cusack in the Times as one of my favourite actresses. Back then, she was starring in Ibsen’s Ghosts as Helen, one of theatre’s most notoriously protective mothers, breaking down over her relationship with her damaged son. Like all Cusack’s performances, it showcased her ability to match searing intensity with the wittiest of humorous touches.
This autumn, she’s heading up the first major revival of That Face, the 2007 play that established 19-year-old Polly Stenham as a major playwright. If Ghosts pushes its lead to the edge of breakdown, That Face takes her over the edge and far beyond, as we watch Cusack, in the role of “Martha”, descend into drink- and drug-fuelled depravity.
This time, it’s a teenage son forced into the protective role, as Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Henry struggles to hide the truth from school and society. But like Ghosts, this is a tragedy about a mother who takes possessiveness to destructive lengths. I won’t tell you what happens in the scene when Henry comes home with a love-bite from another woman, but file your nails in advance, because you’ll be digging them into your hands.
When I spoke to Cusack ahead of the production, she was hopeful that “an audience now will be more compassionate towards Martha” than in 2007. We have undergone a revolution both in our attitude towards mental health and in our understanding of the pressures placed on mothers. “I think the audience will be ready for the notion that there’s more to the monster than being monstrous, and there’s pain in there.”
But compassion or no compassion, her Martha has become monstrous. That’s why wealthy former husband Hugh (Dominic Mafham) has fled for Hong Kong and another woman; why daughter Mia (Ruby Stokes) spends her holidays at his empty London flat or with friends from boarding school. Hilton-Hille has the harder challenge of showing us why Henry stays. It’s a challenge he rises to admirably, all doe-eyed desperation for approval and hopeless optimism. Audiences who have spent time with addicts will recognise the wretched cycles of promised change and dashed hope.
This is Hilton-Hille’s stage debut after drama school, which seems hard to credit in a performance so completely realised. He has a theatrical pedigree: his parents are the actors Anastasia Hille and Paul Hilton. There’s an urgent conversation to be had about the frequency with which the offspring of established stars seem to lock up big debuts in TV and film, but in this instance it this feels like we’re watching credentials being earned the harder way: a tour-de-force dramatic performance in an off-West End theatre that will get smaller audiences than it deserves. It won’t make Hilton-Hille a star, but it might start him on the track.
Audiences at the Orange Tree may be small, but they’re local and local. This being Richmond, they also tend to be white and wealthy. When That Face first became a hit at the Royal Court in 2007, it also provoked a backlash. As many pointed out, the biggest success story to come out of the theatre’s famed Young Writers’ Programme for years just so happened to have been written by the ultra-wealthy daughter of a City big-wig, showcasing the world of boarding schools and high-value jewellery boxes in which she’d been raised. In 2023, that controversy feels mirrored by the realisation that one is watching an all-white cast—I can’t remember the last show I saw in London of which this was true.
When I point this out to Cusack, she says that the play is holding up a mirror to Richmond’s own audiences, not always comfortably. “You don’t initially think it’s just about white privilege, but that’s definitely there.” She’s also adamant that everyone’s stories—privileged and underprivileged—deserve to be told. “Part of watching and of working on it is the process of thinking, ‘yes, this is a very niche group of people, and they’re easy to dismiss,’ but, actually, when you start delving into their pain and their struggle to be to loved… that is not just a class thing. Their pain is something that is human, it’s incredibly human, and therefore not dismissible.”
Cusack also points out that That Face is only one part of a much broader, much more diverse season of programming by the Orange Tree’s new artistic director Tom Littler. But, to be honest, it is That Face that feels like vintage Littler programming, and in a good way: a modern classic revived, a veteran theatre actress in the lead, and strong hints of Tennessee Williams, who could easily have created the character of Martha. If only Williams had been a staff writer for Succession or White Lotus.
All these—including regular Tennessee Williams revivals—were hallmarks of Littler’s successful tenure at the Jermyn Street Theatre, from which he moved last year. But the production itself is sharply directed by the emerging director Josh Seymour, responsible for last year’s successful The Narcissist at Chichester. Seymour is adept at getting the best out of actors, which shows here, although the family’s climactic confrontation seems to drag on a little too long. He’s a dab hand at using the Orange Tree’s tiny, in-the-round space, helped by Eleanor Bull’s effective set. Look beyond the Tracy Emin realism of Martha’s squalid bed, and you’ll spot the concentric circles marked on the floor and ceiling within which Seymour and Bull constrain the cast. In circular fashion, the destructive effects of Martha’s behaviour ripple out and lure her loved ones back into her orbit.
At the centre of all this lies Cusack’s terrific performance as Martha. Fans of the TV series Bridgerton may come to see Ruby Stokes on stage, thanks to her two recent seasons as a minor sibling to the sprawling family of the title; she’s cool and collected as Mia and a good advert for the Orange Tree’s “Young Company” acting programme. But it’s Cusack’s name that should sell you the tickets and Hilton-Hille’s debut that will prove you got a bargain.
