Phil fest of potted playwright
There’s a good wheeze I’d not heard of before organised by a group of young actors calling themselves “In the Same Boat” which offers an evening with a playwright of your choice: interview, performed extracts, readings, poems…
They roped me in last night to interview Philip Ridley whose terrific second play The Fastest Clock in the Universe (the one that launched Jude Law) opens at the Hampstead Theatre this week.
The evening took place in the dank, crypt-like confines of the Southwark Playhouse, rather suitable for Ridley’s trademark East End Gothic, and was very well attended by students, other actors and oddball theatre goers.
I didn’t get a sense of a Ridley fan club — I’m sure there is one — and no-one seemed to know more about him and his work than I did, or do, which was a relief. But like everyone else I learned even more, notably in the biographical department, and also about his distinctive, forceful way of delivering his own poems.
Looking like a long lost brother of Benny Hill and Declan Donnellan, but spookily attired in the ever present pork pie hat and black clothes that turned into a shimmering mauve under the lights, he rapped out his free form verse with all the anger of David Hare or Harold Pinter but without the middle-class whine of the first or the gravelly bad temper of the second.
A reading from Sparkleshark — a play first directed at the National by Terry Johnson — confirmed it as one of the best plays about bullying and peer group pressure in the repertoire, while a riveting new love duet showed a sexual encounter as a violent war of words and a tussle with a mythical serpent as the height of verbal physical theatre.
Talking about his life in the East End, Ridley movingly referred to the murder of his agent, Rod Hall, at the time of writing Mercury Fur, the first of his extraordinary trilogy of plays about siblings and apocalypse that will one day, I’m sure, receive the proper recognition they deserve.
And he put down his evolution as an artist in unlikely circumstances — his dad was a long distance lorry driver and his younger brother drives mini-cabs — to his asthmatic sickliness as a child, cooped up in an oxygen tent half the time and thrown back on his own imaginative devices rather than the conventional stimulus of an inspiring teacher.
He writes novels and plays, he paints, he takes photographs. And he makes films. He’s still best known, perhaps, for scripting Peter Medak’s marvellous film about the criminal Kray brothers, but his latest, Heartless, is due out soon starring Jim Sturgess, Eddie Marsan, Luke Treadaway and Timothy Spall.
The evening was so good I’m sorry now I missed other “In the Same Boat” nights with Simon Stephens, Neil LaBute, Howard Brenton
and Che Walker, but it may have been the unclassifiable variety of Ridley’s output that made this one so special.
But now I think about it, Stephens must have been good on teaching and music, LaBute on films, Brenton on politics and Che Walker on loafing around in Camden Town…I’d like to hear soon what Jez Butterworth has to say about country life and pig-farming.
September 21st, 2009 at 12:04 pm
You did a great job interviewing Phil last night, Michael. As a hardcore Ridley fan (his first book was Crocodilia, by the way!), had a great time seeing him talk about his work and seeing the new play being acted out. (The male actor has a very memorable role in Heartless, just so you know…)