Ridley has even less time for suggestions that his work is sensationalist. “Someone recently asked me if I thought that Pitchfork was less shocking now than when it was first on. I replied: ‘what makes you think I was setting out to shock in the first place?’
“There might be elements that are surprising or disturbing, but that was my experience at the time. I wrote it coming out of a recession, when people were going around pubs doing the equivalent of the 1920s American peepshows. They’d eat worms or regurgitate chips through their nose. I wasn’t making that up – I saw it!”
Are so many of his plays set in the East End for the same reason? “I hadn’t realised I was doing that until someone pointed it out to me,” he reveals. “It’s not a dogmatic thing. I just tend to put stories in environments I know well. But it’s like Tennessee Williams’s Deep South; it’s very much the East London of my mind.”
Ridley’s imagination is fired up by the area’s “endlessly changing landscape,” which has “every colour and atmosphere for any story you want to tell, from gleaming high-rises to Dickensian slums.” It also has a lot to do with language. “Because my writing isn’t naturalistic I need to know the vernacular I’m basing it on, to make poetry out of it.”
Grubbily poetic, darkly surreal, sometimes horrifying but never conjured out of thin air. This is the world Ridley writes: a place of forbidden things that creep off the stage and into the audience. “It’s about taking something personal to you – a fear or a love, something primal – and shrinking it down to its essence. And the moment you get to the single atom of that experience, it should explode into something universal for everyone.”
Ben Whishaw in Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley (2005)
This total immersion is why, in spite of his claim not to care about reviews, it angers him when people miss his point. The response to his fourth play, Mercury Fur (2005), still riles him. Several critics reacted with disgust to its presentation of a dystopian future in which a ten-year-old is chosen to be tortured to death as part of a city professional’s fantasy role-play. One broadsheet reviewer wrote that it “positively revels in imaginative nastiness.”
In part, Ridley ascribes this to cultural snobbery (“If I’d reinvented Mercury Fur as a lost Greek tragedy and set it in Thebes, no one would have batted an eyelid”). But he also believes that it is indicative of a conservatism that sees theatre, even now, lag behind other art forms.
“Young audiences, families, will go to the Tate Modern and happily walk through sliced up sheep, pickled sharks and unmade beds with tampons on them”, he observes. “But do something like that in a stage play and people are outraged and you’re a ‘shockmaster’.”
Ridley detects a “strange kind of Victorian morality” behind this. “It’s like the nineteenth-century painting of a surprised woman who’s realised that she’s betrayed her husband and has to go back to her family.” He believes that critics want “a context that will help liberate them into how they think they should be feeling. I don’t do that, I guess, so that’s been a bit of a problem.”
Ridley is “always irritated” when people equate subject matter with the end result of a play. “Because Mercury Fur was ostensibly about a very dark subject, the assumption became that seeing it would be a depressing, downbeat or nihilistic experience. But when it’s done correctly, it’s not. It should take you on this ghost-train ride of emotions that leaves you feeling more passionate about life, wanting to live more.”
The cathartic thrill of the ghost train dominates as a trope in interviews with Ridley, connecting his approach to his plays with his films, art and children’s books. It isn’t about sugar-coated, sunlit optimism; it is about waving the dark things of life in our face in such a way that we better understand them. The ride is also a fairytale forest, Ridley’s characters the Big Bad Wolves to our Little Red Riding Hoods.
“Each of us creates the reality we need in order to survive. And for me that’s tremendously empowering”, he explains. “Religion isn’t doing it, so we have to tell our own stories. And I’ve felt this particularly when I’ve been writing for children. It’s about giving them a ritual, a story, to make sense of the chaos.”
Shivered is Southwark Playhouse from 17 March – 14 April; Tender Napalm will tour the UK from May, returning to Southwark Playhouse for a limited run in June; and Mercury Fur will be revived at the Old Red Lion Theatre from 27 March – 14 April 2012.
