No Quarter, Royal Court - review

Polly Stenham's latest work is scintillatingly alive - a bit like Agatha Christie on speed
5 March 2013

Polly Stenham has been the poster girl playwright for Dominic Cooke’s outstanding tenure at the Royal Court.

Her first play, That Face, won hearts and awards in Cooke’s first season in 2007 and her second, Tusk Tusk, kept the excitement bubbling in 2009. This year is Cooke’s farewell season and Stenham is back with another lacerating blast from her customary upper-middle-class moneyed milieu, a world in which children are always being let down by their parents.

Strangely, what No Quarter brought to mind most viscerally was another of Cooke’s triumphs, Jerusalem. “Rooster” Byron, that play’s anti-hero, couldn’t be more different from privileged mummy’s boy Robin (Tom Sturridge), but what these men grippingly share is the instinctive ferocity with which they are prepared to defend what they see as their territory.

But just sometimes, Stenham reminds us painfully, the myths we tell ourselves about home are all wrong. Living like a “landed gipsy” in a house full of moth-eaten stags’ heads, Robin, a damaged, drug-taking innocent, has agreed to help his dementia suffering mother Lily (Maureen Beattie) to die. The revelation at the end of act one, that Lily has sold Robin’s beloved home to developers, is the catalyst for a disparate — and desperate — cast of characters to arrive on the night of her wake. It’s a mad, modern spin on the traditional country house drama, like Agatha Christie on speed, and is marshalled with verve by Jeremy Herrin, the director of the moment.

Like the play, Sturridge’s performance is weird and wild and winding and wonderful; he’s an exciting and frightening actor who shouldn’t be allowed to absent himself so frequently from our stages. He glides effortlessly through the script’s occasional bagginess and there is wonderful support from Joshua James as an affected young aesthete.

Stenham is that rare thing, a truly exciting writer. Her plays could do with some editing, but her work is scintillatingly alive. There will, no doubt, be new writing this year that is neater or better structured, but it is hard to envisage anything providing this kind of mainlining thrill.

Until February 9 (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com)

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