Tender Napalm

Philip Ridley’s new play is yet another nimble body swerve for this wonderful playwright. He started his professional theatre work with the ‘East End Gothic’ of The Pitchfork Disney, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, and Ghost from a Perfect Place; he then began developing the storytelling sequence, a large number of plays for young audiences and adults centred on acts of storytelling that reconstruct memories, identities, civilisations. In the 2000s his plays became somewhat more realistic in tone; I say somewhat to indicate that the characters now have recognisable names and the locations are more explicitly identified. Plays like Vincent River, Leaves of Glass, Piranha Heights and Mercury Fur still burst with gothic horror, explosions of poetic language and a baroque, shifting sexuality.

And now he’s gone in a new direction. Tender Napalm centres on two characters, named only as ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’. It’s another storytelling play; the two characters flirt with each other, challenge each other, insult and imaginatively murder each other; they tell stories of battles enacted on a ruined island; they tell heroic deeds of daring and they boast, brag, mock and taunt. But there’s no location indicated. It’s a play of sheer performance. Two chairs in this production and an athletic physicality from the two performers.

What becomes steadily clear through the course of the play is that these stories have been their way of dealing with a traumatic loss, the death of a child in a bombing. The imaginative landscape becomes gradually understood as the traumatised landscape of grief. The island shattered by a tsunami is the life stripped and barren by loss. The Man’s long story of being kidnapped by pacific aliens and forced to wage their war for them is the extension of a desire for revenge against his daughter’s killers. And finally we see their first meeting; she was invited as friend of a friend to an eighteenth birthday party; he was the sister of the birthday girl, the lavish party being paid for by their mother and dying father. Images from that party are lodged in the fantasy stories like shrapnel from a bomb blast.

Ridley’s writing is both sophisticated and naive. It has, at times, a genuinely childlike quality that is full of unabashed big descriptive phrases. At one point the Man is swallowed by a giant serpent and he starts to hack his way up through the stomach wall towards the heart: ‘It’s like digging a hole in a sky made of meat,’ he says ravishingly. (I remember the first time I saw The Pitchfork Disney and falling in love with the writing as Haley described fleeing from a pack of the dogs by entering a church and climbing the vast crucifix: ‘I scarpered higher, wrapped my legs round the waist of our Saviour, clung onto the crown of thorns for all I was worth’). And then there are moments of extreme sexual violence, as when they imagine inserting a grenade into each other’s cunts and arses.

The Pitchfork Disney emerged from two durational monologues that Ridley performed at art college: one as someone afraid of everything and another as someone afraid of nothing. Bringing the two together then meant building a set and character around these opposed forces. Here he doesn’t need to do any more than bring these two, mirrored forces of love and resentment, desire and regret, nostalgia and trauma. It is a quite breathtaking experience, staged simply and rightly, and embodied with sweaty, muscular passion by Jack Gordon and Vinette Robinson. It makes me hungry for Ridley’s next play.