It was a brief role that would probably have been instantly forgotten were it not for the greatness ahead: as it was, the papers were beside themselves when it came to light, full of headlines such as ‘Doctor Oo-er.’ Matt laughed it off. It was intriguing, though, that the two had a Doctor Who connection, and who better than Billie (and David Tennant) to tell him about what lay ahead? Had she talked to him about it?
‘Very briefly,’ said Billie. ‘I don’t really know how to prepare someone for that. Basically your entire life changes, and it’s really hard. It’s also great but you can no longer go to McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal. You are followed everywhere. Life is so different and it will be for him. Even going to grown-up events changes. It’s all people want to know about. It dominates every single dinner party and wedding. People are obsessed with Doctor Who. It’s so funny.’ The message was the same from her as from everyone else: you simply cannot imagine how your life is going to change.
Of course, Billie herself had had to deal with the constant attention that went with playing a part in such a high-profile series, and so it was that after the announcement of Matt’s Doctorship, a set of pictures surfaced that had been taken back in 2006. They showed her walking hand-in-hand with none other than Matt, at a fête. Both denied point blank they had been anything more than friends, but Billie had just split from her husband, DJ Chris Evans, and tongues were bound to wag. And whatever the reality of the situation, they were clearly getting on pretty well with one another – ‘Doctor Oo-er’, indeed.
‘They were very touchy-feely and seemed really at ease with each other,’ said an observer at the scene. ‘Everybody assumed they were a couple by the way they were acting. A lot of people were talking about how good they looked together. They were definitely having a great time. Obviously, everyone knew who Billie was – but Matt wasn’t at all famous then. It’s amazing to think he has gone on to star in Doctor Who.’
But that was still ahead. Matt was still very much a stage actor, as well as a television one, and now came a role that brought him real acclaim. Although he had been doing very well already, this was the part that made him stand out, that got interviewers interested in him for the first time and that made it apparent he was going to be a great deal more than just any old actor. He was to win acclaim, awards and be forced into a complete on-stage breakdown by the end of it all, and the fact that he made such a huge success of it bespoke major triumphs to come.
The play was called The Face, written by Polly Stenham; Matt played Henry, the son of an alcoholic, Martha, who in turn was played by the veteran actress Lindsay Duncan. Felicity Jones played Henry’s drug addicted sister, Mia. The play opened at the Royal Court, a theatre with which Matt was becoming pretty familiar, and a year later went on to transfer to the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End. It was this role that, as much as Doctor Who, was the making of Matt. The latter was to make him famous, but this role showed his true scope as an actor, one with still very little experience, comparatively speaking. He had to give emotional depth to a character on the verge of a breakdown and had to explore the darkest sides of a mother/son relationship. It was a huge challenge.
The play was very much a drama for our times. It involved a middle-class family, in which the paternal figure has left, in this case to go and live with a second family in Hong Kong, leaving chaos in his wake, along with destructiveness, disintegration and mayhem. It dealt with drug addiction and alcoholism, and was deemed to be all the more shocking because it was not set in a sink estate but in a wealthy middle-class family, of the type somehow deemed to be above nastiness such as this.
It brought Matt massive attention, put him in the big league and, again, gave him the chance to work with a very big name, in this case Lindsay Duncan. ‘I completely admire her,’ he said at the time. ‘She’s a constant source of information — not only about acting but about life and love. She’s a cool cat. There’s something very rock’n’roll about her.’
Lindsay was equally effusive in return. ‘Oh there just aren’t enough good words to say about Matt,’ she said. ‘He’s amazing, and he’s the most gorgeous person, and I will really treasure being on stage with him, always, because he’s so special.’ So there it was – not only was Matt a great actor, but he was a nice guy, professional and very well liked by his peers. There was no ego in the making, no monster lurking behind the goofiness here. And given that he was still so young, this could so easily have gone to Matt’s head, but clearly, it did not.
The play itself was a searing indictment of a dysfunctional family, in which the children are forced into caring for the parents, and alongside the drinking and alcoholism, Mia, who is 15, starts selling drugs at school – the school is also a very elite boarding school (of the type the author attended), and not the kind of place where you would expect nice middle-class girls to start dealing in drugs.
The character of Henry, meanwhile, is withdrawn, friendless, attempts to look after his mother to the point of becoming totally obsessed with her – and not in a good way – and sees matters go from bad to worse: it was not an easy role to play. On top of that, Henry ends up wearing his mother’s clothes and jewellery on stage, and wetting himself in protest at her behaviour. In the final scene Henry’s mother dresses him in a silk negligee, pearls and lipstick, much to the horror of his father Hugh, who has finally turned up. Matt later admitted his own mother had found it difficult to watch, which was hardly surprising, given that members of the audience found it very uncomfortable, too.
That was not surprising: there was an incestuous edge to the way in which mother and son were so strongly bound together. Neither could break free of the other and in the end, when the mother finally attempts to do so, Henry falls apart. ‘In big, broad, dramatic terms it’s about co-dependency and addiction,’ said Matt. ‘They’re [Martha and Henry] completely intertwined together, they are completely united. And it’s about that separation and it’s about the bombs that go off in this family home that shatter all the relationships. I sort of view it as you would a man who is addicted to crack, cocaine or heroin, whatever – with Henry and his mother, it’s that obsession. Their world is kind of defined by each other.’
Although the play confronted very difficult issues, Matt was happy to tackle them straight on. It was a world away from his comfortable, secure family background, and so he could have had no personal experience of the torment his character suffered; it was a mark of what a fine actor he was becoming that he gave such depth to the role. ‘The thing I find tricky to get my head round is why doesn’t he just leave?’ he said in an interview at the time.
‘An awful lot of it is co-dependency. So as part of our research we went to meetings where we met alcoholics and people who are either married to them or are alcoholic’s children. With Henry there’s a real belief – or denial maybe – that he can change his mother. When she is finally pulled away from him to go to rehab, his identity collapses. His sacrifice has been for nothing.’
It was gruelling, though, to go out on stage and display such naked emotion night after night after night. ‘After the first run-through, Lindsay and I turned to each other and said: “How are we going to do this eight times a week?”’ Matt said. ‘And on Wednesday matinees? Fucking hard! Because you just have to pour your whole body, your whole heart at it. And just run as fast as you can. I’m going to have to be disciplined. I’m going to have to drink less. No pints after work…’ Not that he had ever shown any signs of not being disciplined previously. Those early years in which he’d trained as an athlete were really coming into their own now: Matt knew how to focus and was doing so to enormous effect.
That Face was a turning point in Matt’s life. The entire cast of the play was nominated for the 2008 Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, and the role won Matt the Evening Standard award for Best Newcomer. His peers were talking about him, and while his name might still have been relatively unknown outside the theatre-going
public, aficionados and fellow stage folk were beginning to know who he was. He was still a very young man, but was finding himself more talked about than stage veterans twice his age.
After its extremely successful run at the Royal Court, there was a brief pause before the play transferred to the West End. Matt had had a break from all that angst up on stage – but was now going to revisit it. He was looking forward to it, however, and had created all sorts of scenarios in his mind about what the unfortunate Henry did next. ‘Do you know a band called Antony and the Johnsons?’ he asked one interviewer. ‘I think Henry will probably turn out making a pained musical album like that. I don’t think he’ll have sex for a long time. I think Henry’s in trouble, he’ll have a lot of therapy, and I think he’ll struggle with his future relationships. But then, I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe Polly will write a sequel. Fingers crossed she does. She’s only 21.’ Matt was only a couple of years older himself, but was showing a wise head on young shoulders. Clearly he had been giving the role a great deal of thought.
The cast had changed slightly in the transfer to the West End: Hannah Murray was taking Felicity Jones’s role as Mia, which in turn gave the cast a chance to look at the play in a slightly different way. ‘You can slightly feel sometimes like you’re inheriting something and actually it’s more interesting and rewarding, I think, to do it through innocent eyes, as it were,’ Matt said. ‘You sort of question the new choices you’re making because you think, actually it worked like that, so why is it not like that now? Obviously we’re in a new space and that makes it completely different.’ Apart from anything else, the new space was bigger. The Royal Court is a small theatre, which meant the audience got a very intimate view of the proceedings on stage; the new place was larger, which meant that the claustrophobic dealings within the family would have to inhabit a wider space. Most people felt that the transfer worked, although there were a few gripes, of which more below.
Matt and the rest of the cast had taken it all extremely seriously. They had all got to know their subject matter, by learning about alcoholism and self-help groups, and although the subject matter was rather grim, this was an aspect of the job that Matt very much enjoyed. Adopting new personalities meant learning more about other areas, which played well with Matt’s genuine curiosity about life. Because for all his earnestness, thoughtfulness and perception about the character he was playing, and despite that his appearance, his ‘face with elbows’, was striking, there was something slightly of the enthusiastic child about him. He retained this quality when it came to playing Doctor Who, another of the reasons it was such a success.
‘I quite like the transitions of being an actor, because you get to explore these little pockets of life,’ Matt said. ‘So if you’re playing a builder you get to know about building; if you’re playing a scientist or a physician or something you get to know about physics. And similarly with this world, I like exploring their culture, that very sort of upper middle class, addictive … that’s part of the reason I love it.’
These investigations made him realise that the character of Henry was, in fact, a very complex one, far more so than it at first appeared. He might have been locked into a terrible and destructive relationship with his mother, but in a strange way it gave him something, too. ‘At first, I couldn’t get my head round it. I was like, why doesn’t he [Henry] leave, why doesn’t this character just leave?’ he repeated in another interview. ‘Because it’s hell for him, obviously. But in fact it’s not, it’s hell and it’s heaven at the same time. This is what’s so difficult. This is why it’s so interesting, because it’s a complete contradiction. It’s their relationship; it’s like, actually she drives him mental, but he can’t leave her because he’s addicted to her and the love he gets off her, and the type of relationship they have. It’s fascinating. So to understand it I’ve really had to look into that area of life.’
Only as an outsider, though. Although Matt worked very hard and was dedicated to his profession, there had never been any sign in his case of the insecurities so often found among actors, which could lead to any form of abuse, on his part. Rather, Matt sometimes seemed almost too normal to be an actor. He loved footie and going to music festivals. There was no inner darkness lurking inside. The close relationship with his parents was one element of that: they kept him grounded, even in those early days of beginning to feel his way as an actor, something that was to prove invaluable just a couple of years hence.
But the turmoil he had to experience on stage did take its toll, even when he had become used to performing it on stage every night. ‘Me and Lindsay … we did a run-through yesterday and we came out and even now we look dazed,’ said Matt in the middle of rehearsals for the transfer to the West End. ‘You have to take a deep breath, because you have to invest so much of your body and your heart and everything into it for it to work, you know, so it is tough, but I like it that way. Which was fortunate, for it was a necessary part of the whole process – but again, it spoke of great things to come one day.
The reviews for the new production were on the whole very positive, and quite a few of them singled out Matt for particular praise. They were also keen to emphasise that the subject matter, with its hints of incest even more shocking than the alcoholism and drug addiction, was very brave for everyone to tackle – writers, players and directors alike.
‘Forget all the hype about Polly Stenham, at 21, being the youngest West End debutant since Christopher Hampton,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian, giving it four stars. ‘What matters is that her 90-minute play, first seen at the Royal Court Theatre, has a quality of emotional desperation one more often associates with mature American dramatists like Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee than with cool young Brits. This is also one of the first English-language plays I can recall to deal explicitly with mother-son incest. Stenham’s god-given gift … is an ability to communicate pain and longing. The most moving aspect of the play is Martha’s morbid fixation with her son. Lindsay Duncan brings to the role a blanched beauty and dreamy sensuality … Duncan’s brilliance is matched by Matt Smith whose hapless Henry is both one of those whom Oedipus wrecks and a residual snob, who greets his returning father with “you reek of duty-free”.’
Simon Edge, in the Daily Express, also expressed his admiration, and agave it four stars. ‘When Polly Stenham‘s Oedipal drama about a scarily dysfunctional upper-middle-class family was first performed at the Royal Court’s tiny Upstairs theatre, the 20-year-old playwright was garlanded with “most promising” awards,’ he wrote. ‘Now the play has transferred to the West End, it is clear she deserved the acclaim. There are times when Jeremy Herrin’s production seems underpowered. The comic part of the writing struggles to get through and some of the younger performers may be better suited to the original, smaller space. But that should not detract from the achievement of this intensely moving, skilfully crafted piece.’
Matt was singled out for praise by Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. ‘When That Face opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in April 2007, I described it as one of the most astonishing dramatic debuts I had seen in more than 30 years of reviewing,’ he wrote. ‘Watching this West End transfer, the play seems every bit as fresh, passionate and blackly comic the second time around. Matt Smith is outstanding as the 18-year-old Henry, who is so pitiably desperate to save his mother from herself – his final scene of emotional collapse is shattering in its intensity.’
Matt also got a name check from Benedict Nightingale in The Times; he too gave the production four stars. ‘That Face … has its prolix and its overstated moments, but it impressed everyone when it launched Stenham’s career at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs last year,’ he wrote. ‘With reason too, since it catches the confusions of an Ab Fab-style family that’s clearly been disintegrating since the father, Julian Wadham’s Hugh, remarried and absconded to Hong Kong. Is it plausible that an 18-year-old would ditch his academic prospects to look after his awful mother e
xplaining, “She’s my life”? Well, Matt Smith has the emotional intensity to make you buy it. This gangling, gawky actor gives a performance to match the excellent Duncan.’
There was another four-star award from Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard. ‘That Face … generates such emotional power because it faces up unflinchingly to the consequences of a mother/son incestuous bond. This is the first play on the subject by an English author since Noel Coward’s more oblique treatment in The Vortex … Incest becomes the defining symptom of a rich, privileged, middle-class family in crisis and dysfunctional collapse. Although the dormitory incident beggars belief, betraying Stenham’s immaturity, she handles the incest theme with assurance. In Jeremy Herrin’s powerful, expressionistic production, a centre-stage bed is the single stage property. Here lies Henry’s mother, Lindsay Duncan’s Martha, a glazed alcoholic and blanched, petulant blonde, with something of several Tennessee Williams heroines about her. In spellbinding scenes that steer a wavering line between black comedy and a drama of erotic possessiveness … Matt Smith’s virtuoso performance makes it clear that Henry’s life rather than Martha’s has been ruined.’
Only Michael Coveney, in Whatsonstage.com was less impressed, giving it only three stars. ‘It’s an odd thing, transfers that don’t quite live up to what all the fuss was about,’ he wrote. ‘Although Polly Stenham’s first play That Face – a product of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Programme, first seen in the Theatre Upstairs in April last year – is clearly the work of a fine new talent, it hasn’t really hit the West End with a hurricane force. Jeremy Herrin’s production has lost some of the engaging messiness it had Upstairs.’
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