The Pitchfork Disney; The Fastest Clock in the Universe; Brokenville; Vincent River; Mercury Fur
Philip Ridley was born in 1964 in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, the area that has provided the settings for nearly all of his plays. In addition to being a playwright, Ridley is a poet, novelist, painter, photographer, screenwriter, children’s author, performance artist, librettist, songwriter and film director. The origin of this prolific diversity lies in his childhood when, stricken with chronic asthma and alienated from school, he was largely self-educated. His father made him a board to fit his chair on which he would have books, art materials, paper and pens, and he would spend his days in this ‘art capsule’ moving fluidly between reading, drawing, writing and imagining.1 When he applied to St Martins School of Art, his subject was nominally painting, but in fact he continued to explore many art forms, forming his own theatre company for which he wrote texts, music, designed costumes and painted sets. There he also started writing and performing monologues, two of which were complementary: one centred on a character who was afraid of everything (‘I’m afraid of going out. I’m afraid of cats. I’m afraid of dogs. I’m afraid of shadows. I’m afraid of Americans. I’m afraid of friends’) and the other on someone who was not afraid of anything (‘I love the feel of explosions. I love the feel of radiation on my skin. I love the feel of acid on my eyes. I love the feel of being raped. I love the feel of being attacked. I love the feel of blood dripping on another person’).2 Soon Ridley began to wonder what would happen if these characters met, a chain of thought that led to his first play The Pitchfork Disney.
This play, opening in 1991 at the Bush Theatre, achieved full houses and outraged critics, with its apparently amoral fusion of violence and sexuality, realist setting and intense verbal imagery.3 Ridley, coming from a visual arts background, was influenced as much by surrealist film-makers such as Luis Buñuel and Jan Švankmajer, or painters such as Francis Bacon, as by any playwright, and was hard for the critics to place. Similarly, for much of his career, he has been dogged by moralistic responses that pay scant attention to the image structures in his work. Ridley’s contemporaries at art school were the Young British Artists who gained acclaim and notoriety in the mid-1990s for their similarly iconoclastic and unnerving clashes of beauty and scandal. Many of the images in Ridley’s plays sit comfortably alongside such artworks as Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007) – a human skull encrusted with diamonds.
In Ridley’s play Leaves of Glass (Soho Theatre, 2007), the young, troubled artist Barry has an exhibition of his drawings but when his moralistic mother dismisses them as twisted and pornographic (‘All those screaming faces. The tears. That’s not sex as I know it’, p. 247) it falls to Barry’s brother to defend him: ‘They’re a sequence. You see? Individually they don’t make much sense. Composition’s all fucked up. […] But when you put them next to each other and… it’ll start to balance out. Make sense’ (p. 254). The same is true of Ridley; looking at the repeated motifs, the developing shape of his playwriting, the clear groups of plays make it easier to identify the profound ethical and political dimensions of his work.
Ridley’s plays so far fall loosely into three distinctive groups. His first three plays, The Pitchfork Disney (1991), The Fastest Clock in the Universe (Hampstead Theatre, 1992), and Ghost from a Perfect Place (Hampstead Theatre, 1994) share a fascination with violence, a distinctively gothic and claustrophobic sensibility, and are, in particular, marked by their exotically named characters – Sherbet Gravel, Cosmo Disney, Torchie Sparks – and long set-piece monologues, often on fantastic themes. Although they have been referred to as an ‘East End trilogy’, they wear their East End references very lightly. The second group of plays, often produced at the National Theatre, begins with Sparkleshark (1997) and includes Fairytaleheart (1998), Brokenville (2003), Moonfleece (2004) and Karamazoo (2004). These plays are mainly written for young people and all feature storytelling at their heart; they range from a monologue – Karamazoo – to a large-cast play like Moonfleece. Ridley has called this group ‘the Storyteller Sequence’ and has plans for it to number seven plays.4 The third group comprises Vincent River (Hampstead Theatre, 2000), Mercury Fur (Paines Plough, 2005), Leaves of Glass (2007) and Piranha Heights (Soho Theatre, 2008). These plays, while still rich in metaphor and verbal imagery, take a step towards realism: the character names are more everyday, the locations are more realistically sketched in, and there is a stronger sense of psychological depth to the characters, with a particular – perhaps autobiographically inspired – focus on brotherly relationships.
In a dilapidated house in a derelict landscape, a twin brother and sister, Presley and Haley Stray, fearful of the outside, sustain themselves on fantasies, medication and chocolate. Into this world come the beautiful and terrifying Cosmo Disney and his hideous and terrifying associate the Pitchfork Cavalier. Presley is clearly attracted to Cosmo, but Cosmo has designs on Haley.
The play was startling on its first appearance for its immense theatrical confidence and its lack of an explicitly moral authorial voice, two qualities that seemed, when it opened on 2 January 1991, contradictory. Indeed, the play is structured around opposites – the shabby surroundings and Cosmo’s red glittery jacket, the childlike obsessions of the twins and the intruder’s adult sexuality, the fairytale elements and the brutality of the physical acts: a broken finger, Cosmo swallowing a live cockroach. Previously, the major waves of British new playwriting had been explicitly political. But The Pitchfork Disney does not identify the form of society, even the nature of the world outside the room in which it is set. Cosmo aggressively accuses Presley of being homosexual and Haley repeats xenophobic clichés about foreigners, but what Ridley thinks of this homophobia and racism is ambiguous. This led some critics to say of this play – as they would say of many others – that Ridley was politically disengaged, perhaps even salaciously exploiting the horrors being portrayed. In the words of Dominic Dromgoole, the Artistic Director of the Bush Theatre, the critics were horrified by a play that had ‘no politics, no naturalism, no journalism, no issues’.5 But to others – like me, who saw the play fresh out of university – it offered a ferociously funny and unsettling vision of a 1990s culture shot through with uncertainty, absence and loss.
Strikingly absent from the play are the parents. Parents are absent in nearly all of Ridley’s plays: Vincent River, Leaves of Glass, Piranha Heights, Fairytaleheart and Karamazoo take place in the shadow of a parent’s death; in others, parents are absent or unmentioned. In some ways this reflects the proximity of Ridley’s story-worlds to fairytales, which are filled with parents losing or abandoning their children, children sent to wicked stepmothers and cruel stepfathers, lured by wolves and witches, imprisoned in cottages and castles. This parental absence is not always an unambiguous disaster; in many of the plays, they present an opportunity for young people to free their imaginations beyond the boring constraints of adult society.
Here, though, the absence of parents is traumatic. Haley and Stray continually rehearse memories of an impossibly idealised and extremely conventional family, quite at odds with the eerily dysfunctional and shattered world in which they now live, but where have the parents gone? The play does not say explicitly, but there are sufficient repeated motifs in the pair’s stories to suggest that they died at the hands of a serial killer and that Haley and Presley’s imaginations and memories have been shattered and fragmented by this trauma. In Presley particularly, one sees a fearful, eroticised fascination for the killer, even identification with him. There are repeated phallic images that almost always become images of castration, suggesting a kind of horrified excitement at adult sexuality. For example, Presley’s story about finding a snake and cooking it (p. 19), and, more literally, the huge erection that ‘scrapes across the tarmac’ becoming ‘grazed and cut, leaving a trail of blood behind me’ in Presley’s long dream (p. 66).
More broadly, the loss of the parents is symptomatic of a broader loss of authority; four times, Presley describes the world outside to Haley as ‘black. A sheet of dark cloud obscures everything. No heaven visible’: a phrase which takes on an almost metaphysical sense of loss.6 These characters live in a world where all meaning, certainty, authority and perhaps morality have gone. They are forced to rely on poorly remembered scraps of childhood memories. Even the characters’ names – Disney, Presley, Haley – suggest fragments of a shattered popular culture.
This parental absence connects with a profound sense of loss and abandonment, often worked through visually in the surroundings of the plays. The ‘old and colourless’ (p. 5) room of Pitchfork is joined by Fastest Clock’s ‘dilapidated room above an abandoned factory in the East End of London’ (p. 93), and the burned-out room of Ghost from a Perfect Place with one window which ‘reveals a pitch-black night beyond’ (p. 181). Vincent River takes place in ‘a run-down flat’ (p. 9), and Mercury Fur and Moonfleece in derelict flats in neglected estates. Fairytaleheart transpires in ‘an abandoned community centre’ (p. 9), Sparkleshark on the rooftop of a tower block among ‘discarded household furniture, piles of rubbish and various scattered detritus’ (p. 71), and the characters of Brokenville converge in ‘a ruined house: no ceiling, near-demolished walls, smashed windows, stairway […] Everything damaged by some nameless catastrophe’ (p. 3).
Individually, these evoke particular conditions; together they suggest a profound vision of social calamity. This vision is expressed most clearly in Brokenville in which the survivors of that ‘nameless catastrophe’ have literally lost their memories of the recent past, even of who they are. They tell each other stories and slowly, through these elliptical allegories, grope intuitively towards a reconstruction of what happened. The stories they tell portray a society marked by narcissism and greed, damaged by self-interest and the incapacity of the powerful to love and be loved. In 1991, these were vices often associated with the rightward turn of British politics. While one can easily see the catastrophe suffered by the worlds of Pitchfork and Brokenville as nuclear, military, terroristic or environmental, they are also open to interpretation as a way of thinking through the effects felt by those altruistic cultures of community, welfare and solidarity of a decade of Conservative government, in Britain embodied in that group of policies known as ‘Thatcherism’.
This is not to say that The Pitchfork Disney can be simply decoded as an allegory for conventional political topics. It is crucial to understanding Ridley’s work that he is drawn to ambiguity and abstraction, to imaginative metaphor rather than literal reference. He has precisely not written an explicitly anti-Thatcher play or a savage indictment of homophobia. His plays do acknowledge, without censorious commentary, the simultaneous pleasure and discomfort audiences can feel in witnessing sexual and violent acts on stage, their possibly mixed feelings about complex issues about identity and multiculturalism. While it may draw on moral or political anxieties it cannot be reduced to simple commentary. The Pitchfork Disney, more than any other play, marks the transition from the political convictions of 1980s theatre to the profound ambiguities of the 1990s.
Ridley’s next play was already half-written when The Pitchfork Disney made its debut. Watching the play every night was undoubtedly an intense education in theatre craft that he drew on to complete The Fastest Clock in the Universe, which opened at Hampstead Theatre, in north London, on 14 May 1992. In an interview with Jane Edwardes, he explained
The experience of doing Pitchfork was a revelation to me. It was the most direct contact I had ever had with an audience. I sat through twenty performances and saw twenty different plays. It was a revelation to hear people scream when Cosmo ate the cockroach, to see them nearly moved to tears. I went straight out of doing that into writing The Fastest Clock.7
The lesson he learned was about the virtues of developing a more causally coherent structure for the play: ‘By being that disciplined with myself, it’s given me a greater freedom to be more baroque in other areas that really excite me.’8
The move to a more carefully plotted structure did not mean compromising the outrageousness or the surreal imagery. An older and a younger man, Captain Tock and Cougar Glass, whose relationship seems to be occasionally sexual, share a flat. Cougar is thirty but, in denial of his advancing years, is throwing a party to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. He has befriended a teenage boy, Foxtrot Darling, and it appears that he plans to seduce or rape him under the guise of the celebration. But when Foxtrot appears with a pregnant girlfriend, Sherbet Gravel, in tow, the evening darkens, ending with Cougar’s violent assault on the young woman, causing her to miscarry.
Fastest Clock is typical of Ridley in several respects, one of which is in the age range of the cast. Foxtrot is sixteen years old while the elderly neighbour, Cheetah Bee, is eighty. The very old and the very young fill Ridley’s plays. In Ghost from a Perfect Place, the characters range from twelve to seventy; in Vincent River the two protagonists are seventeen and fifty-three; Brokenville’s inhabitants range from a ten-year-old to an eightysomething. This has in part an explanation in the childhood origins of Ridley’s creativity: isolated from his peers by being withdrawn from school, he spent a great deal of time listening to stories told by older members of his family:
I could sit there – I still can – for hours and listen to people tell me stories about their childhood. My great-grandmother was still alive and she could remember Queen Victoria. My aunt could remember stories of Jack the Ripper. And then my parents would tell stories of the Kray Twins. So this whole dark, glittering mythology of East London was my life’s blood and I did stories about that and pictures about that.9
This simultaneous experience of childhood and age remains a wellspring for Ridley’s mature creativity. In the experience of the plays themselves, however, the older and younger characters seem to be those with greater access to imagination and the power of story.
In Fastest Clock, the extremes of age difference are a development from the irreconcilable oppositions that, as we have seen, also structured Pitchfork. In these early plays, these oppositions create an effect that has affinities with the artistic mode known as ‘the grotesque’. The term emerged in the sixteenth century, at first to describe some aspects of Roman decoration that mixed plant, animal and architectural motifs in apparent disregard for ‘natural order’ or any kind of realism. It has subsequently been applied to artworks that employ caricature, vulgarity and extremes of disharmony and horror. In the late twentieth century, a more precise definition was offered in an influential study by Wolfgang Kayser who argued that what was unsettling about these modes was that ‘the grotesque is the estranged world’.10 By that he meant that the grotesque took aspects of our familiar world and transformed it in a way that unsettles our ordinary sense of things and suggests that ‘the categories which apply to our world view [have] become inapplicable’.11 For the critic Philip Thompson, a way of characterising this is to see the grotesque as
a fundamentally ambivalent thing, as a clash of opposites, and hence, in some forms at least, as an approximate expression of the problematic nature of existence. It is no accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or disorientation.12
Ridley’s work displays just this ambivalence and these clashing opposites and, as can be seen in the critical response at least, generates deep tremors of anxiety in the audience. These are not merely between narrative elements (the very old and very young, for example, and in this play between homosexual and heterosexual), but they are aesthetic (extremes of beauty and ugliness), stylistic (realist settings and surreal imagery), and moral too, in the repeated juxtaposition of infantile and adult sexuality. In Fastest Clock, the play does not underline for us that Cougar’s actions are immoral: if anything, the experience of the play is an increasing discomfort deriving from simultaneously experiencing mounting horror at Cougar’s plan alongside a sense that the play’s farce structure is encouraging us to will Cougar on. As Ridley has said more recently, the play owes a great deal to the English tradition of high comedy: ‘I’ve always thought it’s set up like a classic Noël Coward two-act comedy. Instead of “Rupert” wanting to seduce “Sophia”, it’s Cougar wanting to rape Foxtrot.’13
Brokenville had a long gestation, beginning its life as Cavesongs while Ridley was still at St Martins; it then became Apocalyptica, performed as a work-in-progress during the run of Fairytaleheart at Hampstead Theatre in 1998. In May of the following year, it was performed for five nights under the title Brokenville by a cast of Kosovan refugees in St George’s Church, Dagenham, directed by Benjamin May. Ridley revised the play again in 2002, when asked for a second time to contribute to the National Theatre’s Connections programme of plays for young people, and the play was performed at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in July 2003. It is a key play in the ‘Storyteller Sequence’ and Ridley imagines that it would be the last of the plays in that series. It is also a key play in Ridley’s career.
It is set in a ruined house after an unnamed catastrophe, where a group of young people and an elderly woman slowly gather. There is a very young child, traumatised and anxious, whose book of fairy stories has been almost destroyed. The assembled group take turns improvising and acting out stories both to calm the child’s fears and somehow to make sense of the horrors that have befallen them all.
Stories have always played a central role in Ridley’s dramaturgy. In Pitchfork, there are several set-piece monologues, one of them, Presley’s horrified account of a recurring nightmare, lasting five pages (pp. 65–9). In Fastest Clock, the image of the title is expressed as the conclusion to a elaborate fairy story told by the Captain. In Ghost from a Perfect Place, Travis Flood is an East End gangster returned from many years away to promote his autobiography, and the play hinges on the different stories that all the characters tell to make sense of their lives. Leaves of Glass is driven by the attempts of three characters to impose their stories on each other.
It is in the Storyteller plays where story takes on the task of generating the dramatic action. In all of these plays, the act of telling a story is what moves the play from its beginning to its end. In Karamazoo, a teenager’s way of coping with the loss of a parent is to remember and retell the stories they used to make up. In Sparkleshark, a young boy is menaced by the other kids on the estate and – Scheherazade-like – finds himself compelled to tell stories to avoid being harmed. In Moonfleece, it is only by listening to a storyteller that the true story of a family tragedy can be articulated. Gideon and Kirsty, in Fairytaleheart, use stories both to express their upset at their parents’ new relationships and also to find and express a kinship between themselves. Stories for these characters are therapeutic, sources of deception and opportunities for magic, and one of the ways we make sense of the world. Crucially, Brokenville is a play about story’s links to theatre. The play moves from storytelling to drama, as the stories begin to be animated, the broken refugees begin to regain a sense of character. It is a play that shows the role that theatre can have in generating a sense of community, shared history, memory and identity.
Key is the ability of story and theatre to allow us to confront our fears and emerge better armed against them. In Fairytaleheart, Gideon expresses this through the image of a tribe menaced by a monster in the jungle who deal with this threat by telling each other stories about it around the campfire (pp. 26–9). This image is echoed in Brokenville with the characters building a makeshift campfire in the ruins of the house and telling their stories round it. As the play begins, the characters have suffered a traumatic catastrophe so decisive that they can barely remember who they are; like kids in a playground, they give each other nicknames based on appearance – ‘Satchel’, ‘Quiff’, ‘Bruise’ and so on. As these shattered characters begin to tell their story, we seem to be hearing an allegorical account of the destruction of their society. The group tells five stories, all set in a magical world of Kings, Queens, Princes, Dragons and Witches. None of the stories can be precisely turned into a realistic account of the calamity, but the picture is painted of a society rendered brutally unequal by the narcissism and selfishness of its rulers, ruined by warfare and neglect. Once the stories are told, the child ends the play by announcing that he is no longer scared.
The sentiment is understandably simplified in this play for young people but this is a structure that may be found throughout Ridley’s work. His interest in violence and taboo imagery is precisely that the theatre gives us a chance ‘to open a few doors to point out that these things go on so that we can consider and experience them’.14 In Leaves of Glass, Barry describes a suicide bombing but does so as if it were a painting: ‘There was all this burning wreckage around him. The flames were all cadmium yellow and vermilion’ (p. 232), suggesting that aesthetic perception may be a way of coping with the horrors of ordinary life. Barry shares with Vincent in Vincent River – and Ridley himself – a childhood fascination with images of atrocity: images of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and of Kim Phúc, the girl famously photographed fleeing from a village in Vietnam, napalm burning her skin.
Ridley’s attraction to the East End – or at least what he calls ‘my mythical East End’15 – is in its simultaneous beauty and harshness, its wealth of experience and its material poverty; in particular, Ridley is drawn to the harsh vividness of the way language is used: ‘There’s a caustic beauty, the beauty of battery acid on metal, a real sulphuric beauty to East London images and I’ve always been really attracted to that.’16 The art of storytelling is a form of aesthetic reframing that takes you beyond conventional moral responses to something subtler, more plural.
Ridley’s first adult play for six years, which premiered on 6 September 2000, marked a striking change of direction. Gone are the baroque character names, the fabulist set-pieces. Vincent River is a two-hander for Anita and Davey, a middle-aged woman and a young man. Anita’s son, Vincent, has recently been killed by a gang in a disused railway station that was a well-known gay cruising area and Davey says he found the body while taking a shortcut with his girlfriend. What slowly, painfully emerges through their halting and awkward conversation is that Davey and Vincent were briefly lovers and Davey had been the one who persuaded Vincent to go there for sex at the station.
Vincent River is a tour de force of simple, almost classical playwriting. As in a Greek tragedy, the extremes of action take place offstage and the two characters are like messengers reporting these events. Anita’s story, which parallels Vincent’s, is of her ostracism by the community after she became pregnant by a married man. The play is not long, probably no more than ninety minutes in length, and its action, as in most of Ridley’s plays, proceeds in real time without a break; none the less, it manages to express both a forty-year history of attitudes to sexuality in the East End and a more intimate story of two people coming together in shared grief. The dramaturgical mechanism is equally elegant: one character who desperately wants to tell his story but doesn’t know how, another who needs to hear his story but doesn’t know why; the one wanting the details of a man’s death, the other wanting the details of his life.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Vincent River is wholeheartedly realistic, let alone naturalistic. The play has Ridley’s characteristic intensity of expression and delight in strong verbal images and there is a striking moment – perhaps one of the few moments of overt physical action in the play – when Davey draws Anita into his story, pushing her to confront precisely the nature of their relationship by playing Vincent’s part in their first sexual contact. As the young man and older woman caress each other and kiss, it feels like a moment of intense ritual, both characters wanting the act of performance to bring his lover and her son back.
Vincent River is perhaps the first of Ridley’s plays that directly presents a gay character. Although there are homoerotic moments in the first three plays, the plays do not seem to place much emphasis on identity politics. This play tells the story of Davey’s burgeoning sexuality and does so with delicacy and sympathy. Perhaps it does so because it is based, Ridley says, on the story of someone he knew at art school who died in similar circumstances to Vincent. As such, this marks a turn towards more personal subject matter. While it would not be helpful to think of any of Ridley’s plays as autobiographical, it is hard to avoid seeing the relationships between brothers that run hauntingly through Fastest Clock, Mercury Fur, Leaves of Glass, Piranha Heights and Moonfleece as reflecting Ridley’s own family relationships. More precisely, in Leaves of Glass and Piranha Heights one brother is a solid family man, the other an artist, a relationship that resembles Ridley’s published descriptions of his own sibling relationship.17 What seems to go along with this closer, more personally searching period of his plays is a much greater interest in individual psychology which is first seen in Vincent River.
There may be many reasons for this turn away from the style of his early plays. Ridley himself has suggested that dissatisfaction with one’s own work is an important driver in his development, citing the artist Philip Guston who, at several points in his career, abruptly abandoned his techniques, subject matter and artistic affiliations to find new ones, refusing to settle into a style. It may also be that some of the things that were so distinctive in the first plays were now much more commonplace in the theatre, after the wave of new British playwrights that emerged in the mid-1990s, on whose work Ridley had a conscious or unconscious influence. In Leaves of Glass, two characters reflect on seeing a play (which sounds like a parody of an ‘in-yer-face’ drama):
Debbie She was in that play. Remember?
Steven No.
Debbie The raped girl thing.
Steven What raped girl thing?
Debbie Soldiers burst into that girl’s house. Raped her. Shot her. And the girl’s parents. Then set fire to the whole caboodle and went back to base camp calm as cucumbers. (p. 219)
The comically inadequate description and the banal reflection on the play’s purpose – ‘What people are capable of, eh? Awful. Makes you think’ (p. 219) – perhaps indicates that, in writing Vincent River, Ridley was interested in a seeking a less sensational approach to his audience and a calmer, more reflective response. His next play, however, would be an altogether different story.
In an abandoned council flat, two brothers are preparing a party. This is not a usual party, however. The service that Elliot and Darren provide is to make wealthy people’s dreams come true. This week’s party guest has hired them to provide him with a young boy, referred to only as the ‘party piece’, dressed as Elvis, that he can torture and kill with a meat hook for his sexual pleasure. The moral horrors within the flat are matched by social turmoil without; gangs roam the streets, society is collapsing, and it is rumoured that a foreign government plans to carpet-bomb the country into submission.
The play began to gather hostile responses before it took the stage on 10 February 2005, in a production directed by John Tiffany. Ridley’s publisher, at Faber & Faber, refused to publish it. His friends stopped talking to him after reading it. Although this was widely discussed before the production opened, the critics were still shocked: Charles Spencer, writing in the Daily Telegraph, described the play as ‘a poisonous piece’ by a writer ‘turned on by his own sick fantasies and is offering no more than cheap thrills’, while Michael Billington in the Guardian, in more moderate tones, condemned the play for offering ‘fashionable nihilism’ and ‘more shocks than enlightenment’.18
Mercury Fur is indeed an extremely shocking play, but it shocks by painting a vivid portrait of a society sufficiently like ours to be recognisable but exaggerated just enough to see the hollowness of our world in a new light. It is, in the artistic sense, a grotesque piece of work – or, rather, a piece of grotesque work. One of the most haunting inventions of the play is the drug culture it represents; most people in the play are addicts, but the way they take them in Mercury Fur’s world is by swallowing butterflies genetically modified to be narcotic. It’s an image that is, characteristically, both beautiful and about the wanton destruction of beauty. The play suggests that these psycho-tropic drugs have been distributed by the government as another attempt at social control, an idea drawn from persistent stories that the CIA flooded black neighbourhoods with drugs, as a means of destabilising the emergent civil rights movements. More immediately, though, the play is shot through with the paranoia and fear that characterised the ‘war on terror’, America’s and Britain’s response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Although its writing predated the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, the play captures the atmosphere of state brutality, weaponised government, and the images of social disorder around terror attacks. And, as ever, Ridley is drawing on these contemporary anxieties in order to dispel their debilitating power: ‘What I did in Mercury Fur, I did for a reason. I like putting people on a ghost train, but I guide them safely through the other end; I don’t want to keep them there, I want to take them on a ritual of exorcism.’19
More surprisingly, perhaps, Ridley has suggested that the play is less about violence than it is about love:
It is […] about what we do for love and what happens if there is a lack of love. I was interested in what happens to a society if we lose our memories and language disintegrates. One of the things that separates us from the animals is our ability to tell stories. I wanted to explore what happens when we are all robbed of our personal narratives.20
Indeed, as this passage suggests, Mercury Fur revisits some of his earlier work. The emphasis on the importance of stories from the Storyteller Sequence and other plays; the curious loss of memory in Pitchfork and Brokenville; the emphasis on love in Fastest Clock. Indeed, the procurement of the ‘party piece’ is, in some ways, only a hideous extension of the deception and attempted seduction of Foxtrot Darling in the latter play.
In Mercury Fur, the collapse of historical narrative is brought to the fore in the characters’ persistent scrambling of modern history into a peculiar amalgam of misplaced fact, rumour and pornographic fantasy (for example, p. 114). It suggests a connection between the moral vacuity of the present and these people’s inability to remember the past. It is a play that demands a sense of history and a sense of responsibility, not a play that delights in their absence. Indeed, unlike most of Ridley’s plays, the main characters develop a moral conscience through the course of the action. At the crucial moment, Darren and Elliot decide to protect the ‘party piece’ from the Party Guest, and as the government forces start bombing the city, Darren repeatedly urges his brother to say he loves him.
Ridley has divided critics, but critics aren’t the only audience for his work and his plays have always attracted enthusiastic audiences. He has always had his champions, and is often described as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘prophet’, unparalleled for the range and intensity of his work.21 He has had strong ongoing relationships with theatres like the National, Hampstead and the Soho (though the failure of the Royal Court to stage his work says something about his refusal of social realism and explicit political commentary). Aleks Sierz described him as the best British playwright of the last twenty years.22 His plays, despite their mixed British responses, have been acclaimed across the world; since its British premiere, Mercury Fur, for example, has been constantly in performance somewhere in the world. His work has also attracted some of the best actors of the age: Billie Whitelaw in The Krays, Rupert Graves in The Pitchfork Disney, John Wood in Ghost from a Perfect Place, Deborah Findlay in Vincent River; similarly, he has shown a canny ability to write parts that discover the great actors of the future; Jude Law, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Helen Baxendale, Viggo Mortensen, Ben Whishaw and Brendan Fraser all performed in Ridley’s plays and films early in their careers.23
Twenty years after the premiere of The Pitchfork Disney, revivals of his plays have met increasingly receptive critical attention. A revival of Fastest Clock at Hampstead Theatre in 2009 was greatly admired, without a hint of the horrified reactions it received in 1992. If there were criticisms, they were generally that the production wasn’t shocking enough. Even more strikingly, a new production of Mercury Fur in February 2010 saw a complete turnaround of critical opinion, with Lyn Gardner in the Guardian finding it ‘almost unbearable to endure and yet so compelling you can’t stop watching, Ridley’s play is, for all its disturbing violence, fiercely moral and tender’.24 Part of the reason for Ridley’s acceptance is that the theatrical experiences he pioneered have become more widespread and more easily understood. The baroque violence of the first plays was taken up by playwrights such as Anthony Neilson in Penetrator (1993), Sarah Kane in Blasted (1995) or Jez Butterworth in Mojo (1995), and perhaps too by the film director Quentin Tarantino.25 In both Blasted and The Pitchfork Disney, there is a faint suggestion that the nightmare unfolding before us is taking place in the dreams of the play’s female character. Mojo is populated by the dandified, cutlass-wielding gangsters of The Krays and Ghost from a Perfect Place (and even borrows Cosmo Disney’s glittering jacket). Meanwhile the emotionally blank, ancient children of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) come straight from The Pitchfork Disney. In both plays, too, main characters are named, surreally, after pop music stars. Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) and Dennis Kelly’s Debris (2003) show the effect of Ridley’s gothic plays on the contemporary theatrical imagination; elements of Mercury Fur are, no doubt unconsciously, echoed in Simon Stephens’s Motortown (2006). The influence may be felt even more widely. BBC television comedy group The League of Gentlemen may owe a small debt to Ridley in their mixture of comedy and genuine horror. And in another successful comedy series, Little Britain, its most famous character, Vicky Pollard, is said to live in a district called ‘Darkly Noon’ (taken from Ridley’s 1995 film, The Passion of Darkly Noon).
And finally, a small but significant body of more considered critical writing has begun the process of offering a more rigorous exposition of Ridley’s work. Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre offers a reading of Ghost from a Perfect Place that details the accusations of gratuitousness but argues that Ridley places the violence in a social and historical context and the ending, dismissed by some as sentimental, actually represents the political possibility of change.26 Ken Urban’s essay ‘Ghosts from an Imperfect Place’ offers a subtle and sophisticated argument that shows the dependence of the characters in Ridley’s first three plays on nostalgia and a refusal to accept the present or the future. He notes the contemporary significance of this because of Conservative governments’ ideological dependence on nostalgia. Urban shows that while the first two plays end by expelling those figures that pose a threat to this nostalgia, in the third, nostalgia is exposed for its inadequacy and a new story is made possible. Andrew Wyllie in his book, Sex on Stage, places Ridley alongside Harold Pinter but suggests that Ridley outstrips Pinter in his ‘harsh vision of sexuality’.27
Ridley’s vivid and arresting plays marked the first signs of a move away from explicit political commentary towards a new emphasis on ambiguity, metaphor and the employment of harsh, vivid and often beautiful imagery to provoke reflection on the state of our common life, the values we live by, and the limitless powers of the imagination.
Plays One: The Pitchfork Disney, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, Ghost from a Perfect Place (London: Methuen Drama, 1997).
Plays Two: Vincent River, Mercury Fur, Leaves of Glass, Piranha Heights (London: Methuen Drama, 2009).
Two Plays for Young People: Fairytaleheart, Sparkleshark (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). Brokenville, in Shell Connections 2003: New Plays for Young People (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), pp. 1–85.
Moonfleece (London: Methuen Drama, 2010).
Cripps, Charlotte, ‘Cultural Life: Ben Whishaw, Actor’, Independent, 4 July 2008 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/cultural-life-benwhishaw-actor-859382.html>
Cunningham, John, ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang a Label on’, Guardian, 3 January 1991.
Dromgoole, Dominic, The Full Room: An A–Z of Contemporary Playwriting (London: Methuen Drama, 2002).
Edwardes, Jane, ‘Shudder Play’, Time Out, 13 May 1992.
Eyre, Hermione. ‘Philip Ridley: The Savage Prophet’, Independent on Sunday, ‘The Sunday Review’, 28 October 2007.
Gardner, Lyn, ‘The Devil Inside’, Guardian, ‘G2’, 9 February 2005.
Gilbey, Ryan, ‘Viggo Mortensen: A Method Actor in Middle Earth’, Independent,
14 December 2001 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/viggo-mortensen-a-method-actor–in-middleearth-748054.html>
Kayser, Wolfgang, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963).
Kemp, Gary, I Know This Much is True: From Soho to Spandau (London: HarperCollins, 2009).
Rabey, David Ian, English Drama Since 1940 (London: Longman, 2003).
Ridley, Philip, Personal Interview, London, 30 April 2010.
Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).
—, ‘“Putting a New Lens on the World”: The Art of Theatrical Alchemy’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2009), pp. 109–20.
—, ‘Philip Ridley: Our Theatre’s Polymath Genius’, Time Out Theatre Blog, 24 September 2009 <http://www.timeout.com/london/connect/theatre/blog/146/philip-ridley-ourtheatres-polymath-genius>
Thomson, Philip, The Grotesque (London: Methuen Drama, 1972).
Travers, Peter, ‘Review of The Reflecting Skin’, Rolling Stone, 10 May 2008 <http://thereflectingskin.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/a-review-that-sums-it-all-up>
Urban, Ken, ‘Ghosts from an Imperfect Place: Philip Ridley’s Nostalgia’, Modern Drama, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2007), pp. 325–45.
Wyllie, Andrew, Sex on Stage: Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Drama (Bristol: Intellect, 2009).
—, ‘The Politics of Violence after In-Yer-Face: Harold Pinter and Philip Ridley’, in Craig N. Owens (ed.), Pinter et Cetera (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 63–77.
1. Aleks Sierz, ‘ “Putting a New Lens on the World” ’, p. 110.
2. Philip Ridley, Personal Interview.
3. Theatre Record, Vol. XI, No. 1 (1991), pp. 11–14.
4. Ibid.
5. Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room, p. 241.
6. Ridley’s first three plays have been published in a number of different editions, with small variations. Although Ridley considers the Faber edition of Plays One published in 2002 to be definitive, this is no longer available, so references are to the Methuen Drama edition.
7. Jane Edwardes, ‘Shudder Play’, p. 113.
8. Ibid.
9. Ridley, Personal Interview.
10. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, pp. 184–5.
11. Ibid.
12. Thompson, The Grotesque, p. 11, original emphasis.
13. Ridley, Personal Interview.
14. Ridley quoted in Edwardes, ‘Shudder Play’, p. 113.
15. Ridley quoted in John Cunningham, ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang a Label on’, p. 22.
16. Ridley, Personal Interview.
17. Sierz, ‘ “Putting a New Lens on the World” ’, pp. 112–13; Ridley, Plays Two, pp. xxxvii–iii.
18. Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, No. 5 (2005), pp. 280, 279.
19. Ridley quoted in Hermione Eyre, ‘Philip Ridley: The Savage Prophet’, p. 35.
20. Ridley quoted in Lyn Gardner, ‘The Devil Inside’, p. 11.
21. See Eyre, ‘Philip Ridley: The Savage Prophet’ or Peter Travers, ‘Review of The Reflecting Skin’.
22. Aleks Sierz, ‘Philip Ridley: Our Theatre’s Polymath Genius’.
23. See Charlotte Cripps, ‘Cultural Life’, and Ryan Gilbey, ‘Viggo Mortensen’.
24. Theatre Record, Vol. XXX, No. 4 (2010), p. 180.
25. In his autobiography, the singer Gary Kemp, who played Ronnie Kray in The Krays, recalls Tarantino admitting that when preparing Reservoir Dogs (1992) he was influenced by the sleekly stylish presentation of the gangsters in that film (pp. 269–70).
26. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 44–5.
27. Andrew Wyllie, Sex on Stage, p. 78.