Riddlin' Philip

 Having seen a couple of Philip Ridley's plays this year, and read a collection over Christmas, I feel entitled to make a huge pronouncement about his art. Although he has insisted that the contemporary theatre is currently asking questions about form that were posed in visual art during the 1960s, his scripts seem to employ a technique that goes back to the Renaissance.

The clue even comes up in some of his titles: The Pitchfork Disney, Dark Vanilla Jungle, Tender Napalm. Sweet'n'sour is more than just Ridley's favourite Chinese takeaway. The competing flavours battle at every level of his work (director Eve Nicol memorably defined this as 'tickles and terror). Cosmo Disney, the cockroach eating urchin in Pitchfork and Cougar Glass (from The Fastest Clock in the Universe) are seductive and repulsive in equal measure - the latter, with his taste for young boys, shares a sweet tooth with Disney's protagonists The Stray Twins. Never mind the amount of confectionary devoured by the characters: Ridley laces his treats with rat poison.

He brings chiaroscuro across into playwriting,  but his facility for the telling phrase and the extended monologue gives the impression of an almost conservative writer. He subtly undercuts the audience's understanding of events, questioning the reliability of the characters' commentaries. 

It is this mixture of dark and light, the chiaroscuro, that defines Ridley's scripts and makes the violence all the more chilling. Like a good classical author, however, Ridley doesn't revel in the on-stage representation of cruelty. The threat hangs heavy, and occasionally breaks out into a ruck, but the atrocities tend to happen off-stage or, in the case of Pitchfork, in the protagonists' dreams.

Even in his most narrative driven works (Dark Vanilla tells a story from beginning to end, albeit through a very unreliable narrator prone to black-outs), Ridley carves a reality both familiar and alien. Familiar in so far as the props and places are recognisable (chocolate, consumed to excess; stuffed birds; paedophile rings) but alien in that the characters are isolated in their own worlds. Cougar pretends he is young, so as to better seduce teenagers, The Stray Twins keep the doors locked. Even when he does get physical (Ghost from a Perfect Place has a girl-gang getting medieval on an old gangster's ass), Ridley frames it within a universe that veers violently from mood to mood, never dropping narrative for a surreal rush but always challenging the surface impression and hinting at bleaker depths.

Ridley's background - he is also a visual artist and a filmmaker - may have encouraged his adaptation of Dark Vanilla, the young woman could be either sympathetic victim or deceitful abuser (she's both) and whether she is villain or heroine is never established: Pitchfork features detailed descriptions of dreams that appear to contain elements of the play's previous scenes.

There's a lovely sense of Brecht's alienation effect at work - the characters are always distanced from the audience, ambiguous - and Ridley juggles the fundamental division in theatre (between what is actually happening on stage, and what that is supposed to represent) until it is impossible to decipher whether the scripted action is set in reality or is a more symbolic psycho-drama. Tough stuff indeed, and a reminder that the cool, searching intelligence can upset the format without losing a dramatic punch.

Pitch Black

The Pitchfork Disney is a tough challenge: set either in a dystopian future, down the back of someone's subconscious or in a house two doors down from mine, it constantly flickers between moods and modes (paranoid and funny, seductive and monstrous), connecting its four characters through their barely expressed desires and shared alienation. The protagonists (a pair of twins, full grown, not identical but infantile) discover that their fear of the world outside is justified, when Cosmo Disney and his acquaintance (Cosmos doesn't do friendship) turn up and usher in sexual longing, the threat of violence and snapshots from the entertainment underworld.

Heroes Theatre make the most of Ridley's script's ambiguity. The staging is sparse - a single sofa - but colorful - the world beyond the twins' house is guarded by a shimmering tinsel curtain. Eve Nicol's direction refuses to force any additional context onto the series of disjointed, disorientating episodes, allowing the disorientating collision of dreams and fantasies to exist in a suspended reality. From here, both Alan MacKenzie (Presley Stray, the male twin) and Stephen Humpage (Cosmo) are given space to turn their speeches (described by Nicol as 'party pieces') into extended monologues of unfocused terror. Since Presley's main strategy for coping with horror is relating his fantastical dreams, even the sharp interjections of Cosmo never ground the play in a recognisable reality.

Although Ridley is strongly associated with the British neo-brutalist writers of the 1990s, Pitchfork's aggression is psychological. Pitchfork himself is a mash-up of gimp, enforcer and freak show star. Handled with menace by Patrick Stratford, he delights in exercising his power in a final comic moment, yet is manipulated by Cosmo into exploiting his disability. The tension between Cosmo and the Stray twins comes not only from Cosmo's paranoia about homosexuality - and rapacious desire for the sister - but in the conflict between their world views. Cosmo claims no parents and absolute self-sufficiency, while the twins depend on memories of their parents to define their existence.

By allowing the script to exist in a contextual vacuum, the production emphasises its various themes: Cosmos' skills as a showman become strategies to remove Presley and leave sister Hayley open to his attention; the conflation between the sentimental and savagery exposing how violence can be masked; the dreams of Presley spiralling towards an erotic fantasy of complete annihilation - and lurk at the back of it all, a fear of death through intimacy (an unsurprising trope from theatre made in the time of AIDS' emergence).

The taut direction, and largely naturalistic performances (Humpage, in particular, plays up Cosmo's street urchin distrust rather than his fairground extravagance) drives this interpretation hard and fast: Ridley's language is both poetic and littered with pop culture references, like a literary bricolage that slams together pain, hope, life, desire, lust, suppression, ghosts, fear, compassion and rage.

Pitching for Fun and Horror

It is perhaps no accident that the rise of the British neo-brutalists (Kane, Ridley, Ravenhill et al) during the 1990s coincided with the last years of the Conservative government. After all the excitement of Thatcher, who pulled the post-war consensus towards a libertarian capitalism, the period under John Major managed to be both boring and corrupt. Eventually, New Labour came along and booted their arses, before descending into a mini-pops version of their historical nemeses.

Saint Sarah Kane did her best to break through the monotony to expose the horror beneath with some of the most shocking images ever presented on the British stage (and this is a tradition that includes Bond's stoning babies to death (Saved), Barker's civil war rape and execution special (Victory)). Philip Ridley is more subtle. He presents a hyper-reality that feels trapped between the dole culture of London and the aftermath of a future apocalypse, his characters more either glamorous psychotics or addicted shut-ins. The horror isn't in the body, it is all in your head...

And so, The Pitchfork Disney comes to The Tron. Director Eve Nicol is clearly a fan: 'Ridley is a greatly underappreciated writer,' she says. 'He's frequently produced in London but who needs more champions in Scotland.' Taking on his debut play - sometimes seen as the herald of British neo-brutalism - is no simple task, for the artists and the audience.

She continues: 'His lyrical barbarism can be real Marmite work - you’ll love it or hate it.' Even the name, a jarring juxtaposition of happy and brutal, provokes confusion. Beginning with the paranoid arguments of a pair of twins (adult, but stuck in an infantile obsession with safety and sweeties), it takes the post-apocalyptic scenario darker and deeper when Cosmo Disney turns up, like a satanic Godot, with his own kinky enforcer in tow.

'The Pitchfork Disney is an attractive piece for actors, huge characters with spectacular names, appearances and identities, but it is also demanding,' Nicol adds. 'All the cast have their own “party piece:” extended monologues that pop up out of the text, including a nightmarish ten minute post-apocalyptic fantasy. The play is an hour and a half straight through with little relief for either the cast or audience. But once you've worked your way through to the other end of the tickles and terror, it is deeply rewarding.'


The terror and tickles aren't just fancy technique: Ridley is a relentlessly sincere writer. 'His distinctive voice comes from a place of honesty and is fuelled by love for people and their survival instinct,' Nicol concludes. 'Ridley’s stories make your heart beat faster. You come out feeling more human and alive than you went in.'