There’s no one quite like Philip Ridley to dig squeam-free into the viscera of human minds. He's been doing it since ‘The Pitchfork Disney’, his debut play 26 years ago which helped define a new, gruesome movement of British writing; he's doing it still with 'Killer', a trilogy of monologues performed in complete darkness and narrated live through binaural headphones.
Both 'The Pitchfork Disney' and 'Killer', his oldest and his newest, are being performed in rep in the crumbling basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, directed by Jamie
Lloyd.
John Macmillan performs all three stories in 'Killer', but there’s barely any relation between them besides very faint echoes: limb sprouting, head splattering, the word 'liposuctionist'. The first and weakest story is a lecture by a self-professed killer who joins a neo-nazi group, the third a bizarre reverie about an ostrich farmer and a magic ostrich.
But it's the second that works best. Written with Anita Brookner-style primness, a rather old fashioned, well-to-do carer and the elderly woman she looks after are caught up in a pandemic which sees people sprouting sledgehammers from their arms and killing wantonly. The narrator is concerned that this will make dinner late.
George Dennis and brothers Ben and Max Ringham are responsible for the sound element - they've used binaural technology before to great effect - and Macmillan’s whispers through the headphones certainly set the goose flesh prickling. But it’s not quite in sync with Azusa Ono’s lighting. Most of the show is in utter darkness; erratically, lights flash. In fact all the elements – the script, the dungeon setting, the
creepy audio – are exciting on their own, but they don’t quite gel.
The monologues bombard us with all of Ridley in one go: his bone-crunching descriptions of violence, his fascination with the psychopathic fringes of humanity, his insistently wry and ridiculous edge softening – only mildly – the quasi-erotic blows of his language. But above all these twisted monologues affirm his pre-eminence as a
storyteller.