Written for Culture Wars
Philip Ridley’s plays are like staged graphic novels. His worlds are familiar, but fantastical: like life embossed or outlined in black felt tip. He tinkers with the colour filter, so that everything is enhanced, more vivid, and his bipolar dramas flick from dream-like to nightmarish with the speed of seizures. His signature is a cocktail of viscera and glitter.
Usually Ridley works on a single setting in real-time. Shivered, darting frantically around in both time and space, takes his comic book style further than ever. There’s not much narrative, but, boy, does it go a long way. It is a sprawling thing, a web of thin individual threads, but it is bulked up by its cut-up chronology.
Were it played in order, we’d get snippets of backstory spread over a decade, a condensed burst of present tense action and a flash-forward epilogue. The pivotal point, perhaps, is an eruption between two teenage friends. Ryan (Joseph Drake) lashes out savagely at Jack, who has persuaded him to watch a YouTube clip of his soldier brother’s horrific death. Its sheer brutality comes with jaw-slackening suddenness.
As a shattered jigsaw, Shivered demands detective work of its audience. Early snapshot scenes seem unconnected, but as gaps are filled in, connecting threads become visible. Ridley’s exquisite dramaturgical craft means the process of reconstruction is simultaneously cryptic and effortless.
However, even pieced back together, Shivered’s narrative is less important than its social diagnosis. Individual characters and stories are secondary. The world that shaped them, a distorted reflection of our own, comes first.
With its post-industrial ruins and wastelands, its fairgrounds and run-down community halls, Shivered sculpts Essex into a vaguely post-apocalyptic dystopia; half-Marvel, half-mundane. Previously described by the playwright as “a state-of-the-nation dream play”, its England seems empty, perhaps abandoned; semi-lawless and feral. Disenfranchised teenage nerds are left to their own devices and go hunting for monsters in canals. Gangs are on the prowl: packs that hunt down such stragglers and ambush them for mobile phones and pocket money. Truth-seeking conspiracy theorists meet secretly in disused buildings. British soldiers are beheaded overseas.
These are unnerving images, but all are merely skin-deep symptoms of some deeper, undefined national infection. (Ridley, with his emphasis on storytelling and his high-def language, has always harnessed the power of the unseen, and Shivered’s vague sketchiness makes it all the more potently uneasy.) England – perhaps the whole world – seems sick. Real sick. Several of Ridley’s characters have trouble walking. They “feel the veins [in their legs] knotting together;” they keel over with cramp; they wind up in wheelchairs. One man, referred to anecdotally, “lost both his legs to sugar.” (Even one of the tripod’s legs is a bit stiff.) We are looking at a broken version of humanity; one so fearful of the real world that it has retreated from it and, seemingly, (d)evolved accordingly. It’s telling that the youngest generation are worst affected – Ryan’s hands are deformed, Jack limps from the start – but also that Ryan’s attack, when it comes, is almost prehistoric. He clubs Jack to the floor with a rock.
Instead they have turned to an escapist world of their own construction, in which everything is mediatised or faked. Jack (a gremlin-like Josh Williams) is a YouTube addict, telling tales of chainsaw amputations, impaled Santas and Guinness enemas. He argues, passionately and in depth, that the beheading video is a set-up. Meanwhile, Jack’s mother (who he frequently deceives) bluffs her way as a medium, but has nonetheless convinced herself of her ‘gift’. Ryan’s mum Lyn (Olivia Poulet) plays out rape fantasies with her lover Gordy, who works a raffle scam at the funfair that hosts his fake freak show.
The point of this – and here Ridley is guilty of golden ageism – is that Britain has turned away from reality. The disused car-plant, around which the whole of this particular community was built, is a symbol of a long-gone industrial Britain. Now, in this virtual country, it throws a long shadow over the town and its inhabitants.
Like many, Ryan’s family moved to Draylingstowe on account of the factory’s economic prospects. Once a source of life, it is now a tap run dry, after the Japanese owners deemed it no longer suitably profitable and moved their manufacturing overseas. That cost Ryan’s father Mikey first his job, then his life. He committed suicide in the empty factory hulk, which now serves as his son’s hunting ground and his wife’s sexual playground. It has become a totemic relic, a pilgrimage site to which empty lives gravitate in search of something long gone. Yet while Draylingstowe depended on it, the car-plant was also parasitic. Chemicals in paint used at the plant have, Mikey believes, caused the spate of mutations in Draylingstowe’s children.
Ridley handles his poetic politics deftly; all this is glanced throughout, but never rammed down our throats. His command of story is strong enough to remain the foreground and his language, always emotive and evocative, is beautifully heightened, almost to the point of romanticism. Director Russell Bolam stands back and lets the writing do the work, which is perfectly fine, even if it leaves the play’s dramaturgy unvarnished. His design team have worked wonders with the bare minimum: Anthony Lamble nails the graphic novel quality, while lighting and sound from Richard Howell and Tom Gibbons sends Shivered jangling down your spine.
Photograph: Helen Murray
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