| Polly Stenham | |
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Polly Stenham |
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| Born | 16 July 1986 |
| Occupation | Playwright |
| Nationality | British |
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Polly Stenham (born 1986) is an award-winning English playwright best known for her play That Face, which she wrote when she was only 19 years old.
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The daughter of Anthony 'Cob' Stenham, a City businessman, she had little contact with her mother after her parents' divorce, and she and her younger sister, Daisy, lived with their father.
She attributes her love of theatre to her father (who was chair of various arts organisations such as the Royal College of Art and Institute of Contemporary Arts), as he took her to various shows from a young age, including many at the Royal Court Theatre which would later stage her first play.
Educated at the private boarding school Wycombe Abbey and later Rugby, she spent a gap year travelling and working for the Ambassador Theatre Group and the Arcola Theatre. It was during this time that she enrolled in the Royal Court Young Writers Programme and wrote her first play.
She began a degree in English at University College London, but abandoned her place to work on her debut play after hearing it was to be staged and following the death of her father in 2006.[1]
Stenham's debut play That Face premiered at the Royal Court Theatre[2] in London in April 2007. It was directed by Jeremy Herrin and starred Lindsay Duncan as the alcoholic mother Martha and Matt Smith as her son Henry. Stenham won the Evening Standard's 2007 Charles Wintour Award,[3] the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright[4] and the 2007 Theatrical Management Association Award for Best New Play.[5]
The play received effusive praise from some reviewers, with Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph commenting:
This is one of the most astonishing debuts I have seen in more than 30 years of theatre reviewing. Its author, Polly Stenham, a graduate of the Royal Court's Young Writers Programme, is 20 now, just 19 when she wrote a play that sent me reeling into the night... In every respect this is a remarkable and unforgettable piece of theatre.[6]
Stenham represented the Royal Court at the 2007 Latitude Festival before That Face transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End[7] in 2008 with largely the same cast and again under Jeremy Herrin's direction.
Her second play, Tusk Tusk premiered in the downstairs teatre at the Royal Court in March 2009 directed by Jeremy Herrin.[8]
She is said to be writing a third play, No Quarter, which will be staged at the venue's main theatre in 2011. She is also currently adapting her first two plays for the screen. As well as working on a screenplay called Dope Girls for Film Four about the first ever cocaine scandal to be directed by Adam Smith[9].
In 2011 Stenham, along with friend Victoria Williams, opened an art gallery,[10] the Cob Studios and Gallery in Camden, London.[11]
Stenham lives in Highgate in London in her father's old house with several friends, including her younger sister Daisy.
She also dated the actor Harry Treadaway who was present on the press night of That Face in the West End. This relationship has since ended.
She is a fan of Radiohead's album In Rainbows, which she says she listened to constantly while writing Tusk Tusk.[12]