The third in Philip Ridley's informal trilogy of plays on the subject of brotherly love, Piranha Heights tells the story of siblings Alan and Terry, who meet on Mother's Day in their mum's council flat soon after her death. But their dispute about who should take over the property is complicated by the arrival of feral teens Medic and Lilly, who is apparently a Muslim war survivor.
Very quickly, the play explodes into a splatter of wild fantasy, in which a variety of competing versions of reality rush headlong at each other. But, just when collision seems inevitable, Ridley expertly steers the game onto another, even more outlandish terrain.
And although the imaginary element of the play is often outrageously cruel and breathtakingly audacious, it is always firmly grounded in the emotional truth of character. Each of Ridley's creations is both highly individual in their neediness, and at the same time symbolic of the wider society's problems.
Director Lisa Goldman has transformed the Soho space into a traverse staging on which designer Jon Bausor's set evokes council house kitsch. In a thrilling production, Nicolas Tennant's uncomfortable and nervy Alan contrasts vividly with Matthew Wait's more daring and outspoken Terry, while John Macmillan's wonderfully realised Medic is well matched by Jade Williams' hectic Lilly.
When Alan's son, a compelling Luke Treadaway, finally arrives, the scene is set for the final showdown. After it's all over, it really feels as if Ridley has single-handedly brought white-knuckle excitement and appalling truth back to the new writing scene.
Author: Sam Marlowe for The TimesAfter Mercury Fur and Leaves of Glass, Philip Ridley brings us a third startling drama centring on two brothers. It's Mother's Day, and Alan (Nicolas Tennant) and Terry (Matthew Wait) meet at their recently deceased mum's tower block flat to argue over the property. A kitsch family portrait takes pride of place on the wall, but the men have very different memories of their mother: to Terry she was a prostitute despised by their neighbours, to Alan a cross between a movie star and a saint.
Terry has turned up at the flat with Lilly, a jittery niqab-clad woman claiming to be a desperate Muslim war survivor, whom he plans to rehouse in mum's old home; Alan wants to move in with his son Garth and escape the wife he loathes. But with the arrival of Lilly's volatile boyfriend Medic, events shift from off-kilter to grotesquely violent.
Lisa Goldman's traverse production has a ferocious immediacy as Ridley coerces us into taking a wild ride through the disturbing fantasies of his characters.
Religious imagery abounds: the brothers' mum, we are told, embraced evangelical Christianity when she was dying; Medic initially sees Terry, with his offer of free housing and a big telly, as a Christ figure. But there's a queasy uncertainty underlying all these avowed beliefs: why does Lilly's Arabic sound so suspiciously like gibberish? Why is the baby she and Medic coo over clearly a doll? Add to the mix Garth (a blood-chilling Luke Treadaway), with his appetite for sadism and his invisible friend Mr Green, and the results are explosive.
The extravagance of Ridley's dark vision suggests a dangerously confused society in which individuals seize on random gobbets of semi-digested information and use them to construct their own personal narrative. And, having chosen to believe their self-constructed myth, they defend it with all the blind determination of the religious extremist, regardless of how crazy it might seem. It's an environment in which faith is paramount, and yet it can be placed in anything from a conspiracy theory to a fairytale, and where violent stories are absorbed from infancy.
Goldman's highly charged production is relentlessly exciting, a disconcerting and superbly acted surreal image of insane inner-city life. The force of Ridley's writing, as shock is piled upon shock in rich language dense with metaphor, can seem bludgeoning, and while his linguistic skill and theatrical audacity make us reel they don't give us much time to feel, or his characters space to breathe. But the uncompromising vividness of the play has a gut-twisting force all its own.
Captioned performance6 June, 7.30pm
Audio described performance14 June, 3pm
