Ridley: We need to explore the dark side of life
Writer’s new play echoes real life as he reveals gritty edge of society
a gun, you end up with something like what’s happened in America.
“One of the things the play deals with as well is public shaming, which is such a new thing, where people can be humiliated now by people capturing something on their phones.
“There’s this new culture now of people having to resign because of something they said which is made public, whereas 10 years ago it would only be known by people in the same room.
“Things are all pervasive these days, and with teenagers that’s something that becomes much bigger through social media and stuff going viral. I wouldn’t be a teenager now for anything.”
If real life events look set to give Tonight With Donny Stixx an extra edge, the gangs of men convicted for grooming teenage girls in northern England made Dark Vanilla Jungle equally timely.
“I think it made it very emotional,” Ridley reflects. “I hadn’t written Dark Vanilla Jungle using any kind of documentary evidence. I just took Andrea, the protagonist of the piece, in that direction and it became darker and darker. Just knowing that sort of thing was so prevalent for teenage girls gave it a resonance, but all of us picked up on what was going on in Manchester, and that gave things a real rawness.
“One of the things about Andrea is that she got no help. I saw the play as being about misogyny, not just from men, but from other women who don’t help her. I’ve heard it from certain members of my own family that if a girl goes out dressed in a certain way then she deserves it if anything happens to her, and that’s an attitude that prevails.”
While Andrea was played to devastating effect by Game of Thrones star Gemma Whelan in Tonight With Donny Stixx director David Mercatelli’s production for the Supporting Wall company, Donny will be played by Sean Michael Verey.
Sean is best-known as hapless teenage father Jamie in BBC3’s Edinburgh-filmed sitcom Pramface. Both Whelan and Verey recently appeared in Radiant Vermin, another Ridley/Mercatelli collaboration, which saw Ridley make a rare foray into comedy in a satire about the housing crisis.
“All I’m doing is trying to tell stories about the world around me,” Ridley says after being asked where his penchant for dark material comes from.
“With what’s going on in the world, and particularly here with the right wing taking over everything, a more pertinent question might be to ask why people are writing happy plays.
“I look out my window and the demons fly in, but I don’t contrive it. I sit down and write something and if that’s the way it goes then that’s the way it goes, but a play’s subject has no impact on its theatrical impact.
An audience watching King Lear or Medea or Electra can come out as exhilarated as they can after watching Mamma Mia! Dark matter in plays doesn’t make audiences depressed. They can make audiences come out and face the world with more intensity.”
Ridley has told such stories since he was a boy growing up in the East End of London.
“I was really debilitated by asthma at a time when the drugs weren’t very good,” he says. “So if you had asthma you went to hospital. I was really socially dysfunctional and didn’t have any friends, so I would just tell stories through words or drawings in a way that would now be called graphic novels. I read Marvel comics, and for me they were much more real than the world I was living in.”
Ridley studied painting at St Martin’s School of Art, did performance pieces at the ICA and started his own theatre company before his short film, The Universe of Dermot Finn, was shown on Channel 4 and at the Cannes Film Festival.
He has written prose and drama for children as well as adults, has directed three feature films, including The Passion of Darkly Noon, for which he penned a song performed by PJ Harvey, and has exhibited his photography.
Unsurprisingly, Ridley never takes holidays, and despite producing such a diverse array of work, sees each means of expression as doing the same thing.
“I see no difference between all these things I do,” he says.
“If you write about pop music, you can’t write about David Bowie without mentioning William Burroughs or Bertolt Brecht.
“It’s all connected. I blame the style magazines for separating things by genre. I’m doing now what I’ve always done. There are stories in your head that have got to come out or they’ll tear your head apart.
“It’s really about trying to make sense of a world that’s become increasingly senseless, and stories help to disentangle that. Most of the time it’s the darkest parts that come out, but they’re the parts that people need to see.” Tonight with Donny Stixx, Pleasance Courtyard to August 31.
Marianne Gunn NICK PAYNE’S tale of war-time romance (previously performed by the National Theatre) is the perfect storytelling vehicle for Sam Underwood’s Fundamental Theater Project.
Underwood, who has found success in American television drama The Following, stars in this two-hander with “real-life” girlfriend Valorie Curry, who is also a series regular on the (recently-cancelled) network show.
The performance takes place in The Box, a volcanic little space in which all disbelief will have to be suspended when the two characters speak of the snow falling upon their second encounter.
To set the scene: two young people, very much in love, are promising to wait for each other while Leonard goes off to fight in the Second World War.
There are moments of awkwardness and intimacy in equal measure, and finely nuanced interpretations from both actors, while costume changes and musical clues mark the passage of time as the audience realise that fate (and a Japanese PoW camp) has intervened to keep the lovers apart. Their final meeting, although it initially appears over-played, holds the key to now-elderly Violet’s reticence and heartbreak.
This final twist, and the beautifully-lit “sparkler” scene under the direction of Louisa Proske, makes this gentle yet poignant afternoon drama well-worth catching.
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s really about trying to make sense of a world that’s become increasingly senseless. People need to see it
Carmody Wilson WHO IS the real Mata Hari? I’m none the wiser after seeing this Punchline Theatre production.
The frequent mumblings of “Madame Zelle” at the beginning initially led me to wonder if the performers were merely being underzealous in their French pronunciation, but a moment of clarity struck that this might be Mata Hari’s actual surname.
Actors fretted about the stage, committing sins of enunciation and projection, slouching in ill-fitting clothes.
There was a curious theme of short trousers. Then there was singing and, to be honest, a great deal of it was hard on the ear.
The liberal sprinkling of expletives seemed to be an attempted substitute for wit, and a jarring dis-unity of tone had “Madame Zelle” sing out a very crass song about hoping for her prince to come. I don’t need to spell it out, do I?
And she later sings, without a scrap of irony: “I know he thinks I’m promiscuous, but we all need someone to rescue us.”
Mata Hari: The Musical veers wildly between earnest and glib, and turns what is a fascinating story of treason and seduction into a flaccid pulp plot.
Where is Mata Hari in all of this? What happened to her? What emerges is not the story of the alleged courtesan-cum-spy but of a vapid quipster who inspired the undying love of all men around her.
And then she was shot. Nothing more.