There is always pleasure in watching skilful actors handling character and script well. That, alas, is the only pleasure on offer. Philip Ridley sees the human condition through disgust, morbidity and doom. Like the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers his motto is “I wants to make your flesh creep!” In this vauntedly state-of-the-nation play he throws his blanket of unutterable gloom over an imaginary town in post-industrial Essex .
A soldier has been beheaded in Afghanistan, on video; his younger brother was born with deformed hands from industrial pollution, the mother is a glum nymphomaniac who summons schoolboys for group sex. After the beheading she gets her kicks from bondage-torture sex games in a derelict factory, kneeling tied in the same position as her late son. I do not find this credible. Dad,when not looking for UFOs, is having sex with a lorry driver who may have cancer. This makes the soldier son (still alive, the story runs backwards) rant that in the Middle East he’s seen gay teens hanged from cranes, and a good thing too. Cue the inevitable lip-smacking Ridley description of what that looks like.
Another lad Jack (Josh Williams) is obsessed with gory videos, and forces Ryan (Joseph Drake) to watch the clip of his brother’s head being sawn off. Both performances are, by the way, far better than the script deserves. Jack’s Mum is an obese charlatan “healer”. Even when we start to hope that the reverse storytelling is kindly designed to stop us slitting our wrists on the way out by leaving the families in their original optimism, a late flash-forward brings grief, snarling recrimination, brain-damage, suicide, and a prediction that “We will wake up every day for the rest of our lives and we will breathe razor blades and swim through bleach”.
One metaphor sticks. In a brief interlude of familial calm, young Ryan displays a photo of supposed UFO lights and his brother explains “When you see several things, your eye sort of makes connections. Joins them up. Sees unifying shapes where there are none.” Same with the play. Ridley joins up everything horrible he can think of — beheading, hanging, pollution, deformity, unemployment, sexual disgust, obesity, strangled dogs. But it never really makes a serious or interesting shape.
Box office: 020-7407 0234, to April 14.
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Production supported by Stage One