‘It’s survival of the sickest’. Philip Ridley’s 1991 play is the theatre equivalent of a video nasty, and the cockroach-eating carny character who stalks through it is proud to announce that he makes a living from grossing people out. After a long series of striking West End shows, director Jamie Lloyd has brought his fiendishly high-powered team down into the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, and created something deeply sick.
Mostly in a good way. It’s a story of a brother and sister who’ve isolated themselves by telling each other horror stories about a post-apocalyptic world outside.
Then Cosmo Disney shows up. It’s implied that both of them have the hots for him, and Tom Rhys Harries camps up his sexual appeal in a sequinned jacket and an ever-ready pout. His menace is less convincing – the play’s real moments of horror come from the weird nightmares that Presley (George Blagden) and Haley (Hayley Squires) recant, taking us on gripping, breathless adventures about the rabid dystopia outside. The voyeurism of Ridley’s play is heightened by a setting that plonks us in scattered chairs around the edge of a long, thin, dilapidated living room, which morphs from bunker to catwalk for Disney to strut up and down on.
Hayley Squires is great when she’s allowed to be, but she spends most of the play in a corner, doped up and whimpering into a dummy. And Seun Sote plays this story’s bogeyman, the Pitchfork Cavalier, with a touch too much joyful camp for him to be really threatening.
However much fun his gimp-suited turn is, it’s a bit disappointing to have the only black performer playing a role that’s silent and violent, and the only woman infantilised.
What it all left me wondering is: why use a team of seasoned West End creatives to stage a play that’s regularly performed on the fringe, if you’re not going to play around with it a bit? It’s not 1991 anymore, and this nightmare could do with something to keep its terrors fresh.
Still, if you want a faithful, full-throttle Philip Ridley play with all the nasty bits just inches from your nose, then boy oh boy is this the one for you.