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To stop yourself going mad, it’s advisable to avoid seeing more than one Philip Ridley play a month. Their apocalyptic visions, heavy violence, and dark, disturbed characters are generally pretty gruelling.
It’s getting harder to keep to that advice, though, what with the recent glut of Ridley revivals. This latest, which follows quickly on from ‘Ghost from a Perfect Place’ at the Arcola, is a visceral look at angry, violent disaffected kids and their idiotic, self-obsessed father figures.
Set over one night in a chintzy flat, Ridley’s 2008 play starts with two brothers jostling over their dead mother’s legacy. Alan wants her flat for himself and his medicated teenage son Garth – in an attempt to atone for the fact that he’s ignored Garth for the last 15 years. But Terry, the older, wayward soul, has already invited the squatters downstairs – young nonsense-talking Lilly and her volatile and aggressive boyfriend Medic – into a commune. Medic, Lilly and Garth are the new generation: products of neglect from the likes of Terry and Alan and of a hostile society. They are also psychotic, uncontrollable and, the two boys at least, intent on destroying everything. Fucked-up chaos ensues.
The play has a raw, brutal poetry to it, and what it has to say about our responsibility to the next generation feels real and relevant. ‘Piranha Heights’ is not as all-encompassingly devastating or despairing as Ridley’s ‘Mercury Fur’ – a similar play also revived recently in the same theatre – but the piece is just as shocking and intense.
Ryan Gerald as Medic is an incredible ball of taut anger and it is impossible to tear your eyes from him as he spits out his vicious, morbid fantasies. The rest of the cast are also very good, and Max Barton’s production has some nice touches. A TV screen flickers with white noise as Medic and Garth’s rage ratchets up, and then when things get really mental, forest detritus bursts from the seams of the house.
It’s a strong, uncomfortable night of drama and another excellent revival of a stark work by a distinct, unsettling voice.