Jolly Polly and sunning in Sonning
I had lunch yesterday with Polly Stenham at the Menier Chocolate Factory and very jolly it was, too. I knew her late father Cob Stenham, businessman and art collector, when he was chairman of the ICA and I find it ineffably touching that Polly developed her love of the theatre when he dragged her round the fringe as a teenager seven or eight years ago.
Cob, a dapper little brown nut of a man, was a true life-enhancer and nothing at all like the absentee financier father in Polly’s smash hit first play That Face. The dipsomaniac Martha played by Lindsay Duncan, however, is loosely based on her own mother, who is not in touch. The character’s called Martha as a nod towards Albee’s chaotic heroine in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Polly nearly falls off her chair when I say that her mother’s second name really is Martha. She didn’t know! The revelation shakes her for about two minutes before she carries on enthusiastically attacking her splendid lunchtime breakfast platter.
It is odd that the Royal Court seems not to be committed to Polly’s second play beyond a reading. She says she has drunkenly made Jeremy Herrin promise to direct it, and she doesn’t care where — “a northern barn somewehere” will be fine by her.
She won £25,000 with her most promising playwright award from the Evening Standard, but has only spent a small chunk of it on renting an office in Tottenham Court Road.
She escapes there from the house-share in Highgate where the big kitchen table is divided into two sections: the section where her friends study what really happened in politics and history for their degrees; and the section where Polly writes about what didn’t really happen, anywhere, in her plays.
Polly is fed up big time with seeing so many old people sitting in theatres and has insisted on a cheap ticket price policy of some sort for the West End transfer of That Face. A good thing she didn’t accompany me to Sonning later in the afternoon, where the audience is markedly senior and very happy to be so.
Like going to the Chichester Festival Theatre, or even the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford, there’s a mild sense of holiday escapism about whizzing from Paddington on the Oxford train to Reading, then plunging into the Berkshire countryside by taxi.
I meet my friend, the singer Peter Straker, and we have time for a delightful stroll by the river and through the churchyard to the Bull Inn Hotel, where we bask in the late afternoon sunshine with various off-duty business types and dog-walkers.
This really is a world elsewhere. The Mill itself is a privately owned theatre generating its own electric energy powered by the natural resources of the Thames: all the theatre’s lights on stage, in the restaurant and offices are supplied in this way and there is even enough excess to sell back to the National Grid. Give that venue a Green Award!
The play, That’s Love, a nursing home romantic comedy by Ron Aldridge, is perfectly aimed at its audience, who can also flick through the programme for advice on commercial property, garden services and residential retirement homes.
Sally Hughes’s theatre is run like a military operation: everyone arrives for dinner around 6.30pm, shuffles into the theatre for the play, returning to their tables for interval coffee and drinks.
The service is impeccable, the home-made beef and Guinness crusty pie with bread pudding to follow my special tip from the menu.
And in a week when the refurbished King’s Head has re-opened with a discontinuation of its supper service and an only marginally improved comfort factor in the seating, it is a rare treat to visit a theatre where you can enjoy napery, fresh vegetables and a reasonably priced wine list all within a £40 dinner and show price range.
