Time equals rot and decay in this nightmarish slice of East End gothic. Philip Ridley’s second play after The Pitchfork Disney begins like a homoerotic version of Steptoe & Son and ends in bloodshed. It’s Pinter as darkly funny fairy tale; a fever dream of murky things lurking in the shadows of an urban wasteland of filthy underpasses and disintegrating flats. A squalid past haunts a fearful future.
Captain Tock wants to touch so badly. On his sofa Cougar Glass lounges like a degraded Calvin Klein model, bathed in the pornographic glow of a sun lamp. He’s Dorian Gray in a pair of tighty-whities: lithe and beautiful, but ugly in his fathomless sunglasses and depthless preening. He smashes the Captain’s clocks. He can’t bear to hear the tick of time advancing.
Today is Cougar’s 19th birthday – as it has been for years. There’s a cake in the bedroom, fake cards on the mantelpiece and a special present on the way: 15-year-old Foxtrot Darling, who’s lost one brother and is looking for another. Cougar, who has lied his way into the boy’s life, can’t wait. He slicks back his hair and fondles his hard-on. The Captain watches.
This revival captures the merciless cruelty of Ridley’s two-handed first act. Portraits of birds beloved by the Captain hang next to stuffed ones from eggshell-blue walls. The crumbling flat is both a womb and a cage. But who’s imprisoned? Joshua Blake’s Cougar is vain and stupid, but cunning. He knows the middle-aged Captain loves him and tortures him with it.
Ridley’s dialogue tumbles out like dirty poetry as Ian Hougton’s trampled-down Captain sets the scene for Cougar’s latest seduction. We never learn how the younger man has come to be so confidently ensconced in his flat. The age gap begs dark questions, but the play isn’t interested. It inhabits a dream-like landscape of the relentless here and now.
It’s baggier than Ridley’s later work, lacking the vice-like tightening of grip that made Mercury Fur and – more recently – Dark Vanilla Jungle so bruisingly good. And as Cougar and the Captain walk the same vicious circles around each other in the first act, Tom O’Brien’s production substitutes volume for momentum. It’s all a little stiff and shouty.
Amid the noise, Ania Dawson glitters darkly as Cheetah Bee, the Captain’s ancient landlady. Wrapped in furs, her sing-song rasp as she calms a Cougar fearful of his true age is steeped in the bloody history of the store her dead husband owned below the Captain’s flat. She’s seen animals skinned alive for their pelts, knows the cruelty of beauty and relishes it.
This production – like the play itself – comes into its own after the interval, with the arrival of Foxtrot Darling and his own surprise: his pregnant girlfriend (and dead brother’s ex), Sherbet Gravel. What follows is a battle of wills fought with party hats and blown-out candles as Cougar’s plans are ruined by Sherbet and her arsenal of party tricks.
Dylan Llewellyn is good as Foxtrot, obliviously starry-eyed and puppyish around Cougar. But the standout is Nancy Sullivan as Sherbet, an invading force with a bright pink handbag. With perfect comic timing, she nails her character’s smiling malevolence, silencing Foxtrot with a hard-edged “babe” as she turns the tables on Cougar: she knows his game. And she knows his real age.
O’Brien ratchets up the tension to a hysterical level, which ends in a chaotic moment of knives, guns and shocking violence. This sudden tonal shift isn’t altogether successful in a production that sometimes struggles with Ridley’s febrile blend of cartoon grotesquery and horror. But this doesn’t muffle the essential power of the scene.
Later, as an expressionless Cougar sits on the now blood-stained sofa, stuffing his face with cake, the Captain helplessly closes the door on the outside world and turns to face him. He’s locked them back into their cage. Here, love is the most twisted of fairy tales. Like a stuffed bird, its timelessness – its immutability – is hideous.
