That Face

A timid novice playwright, Polly Stenham begins her play with a torture scene. Mia (Emma Barclay) and Izzy (Krew Boylan), seniors at an exclusive girls' boarding school, have bound, gagged and drugged a quivering 13-year-old, Alice (Laura Hopkinson). Without teachers around, "age becomes like rank," Mia calmly explains, with the listless detachment of the cruel teen.

Bullies are made, not born. We soon meet Mia's mother, the alcoholic Martha (Susie Porter), and her 18-year-old brother, Henry (Kenji Fitzgerald), who has dropped out of school to keep an eye on his mum until she "tops herself - or gets better." Make no mistake: this is Porter's show. As Martha, she embodies the warring personalities of the hopeless drunk, veering from playful pussycat to howling beast, and creepily dependent on her caretaker son. "My baby boy... you look like a Russian soldier," she coos from the web-like folds of the bed she rarely leaves, like a clingy spider spinning emotional traps for her offspring.

The children's father, Hugh (Marcus Graham), is a stockbroker who has fled this crumbling household and started a new one in Hong Kong. When he flies in to rescue Mia from expulsion by waving a chequebook, he also has a chance to do something about Martha, although it may be too late to save the souls of his kids.

A playwright might struggle their entire career to write something as punchy, elegant and psychologically astute as That Face, and Stenham wrote it at the age of 19. It opened at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2007 and won the Evening Standard Award for Best New Play. Stenham has freely admitted her debts to Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, and the play is like a miniature ...Virginia Woolf spiced up with bits of Streetcar.

Director Lee Lewis has successfully relocated this tale of family dysfunction to Sydney, and loses little in the translation. Porter sways and brays magnificently, and there's also superbly understated work from Barclay, whose Mia seems to have walked in off the streets of Paddington rather than from the imagination of a prodigiously talented Brit. Company B's season-launcher is a little piece of dynamite. Nick Dent