[title]
With Jez Butterworth’s ‘Mojo’ opening in the West End and Philip Ridley’s ‘Fastest Clock’ pitching up here in Islington, we’re in the thick of a tiny ’90s revival. And with that comes the decade’s long snarl of designer nihilism where young men strutted in retro fashions and wound up performing some gruesome act of violence. Ridley’s 1992 play is certainly good for all that with the preening hero Cougar as a sado masochistic Dorian Gray. He opens the play modelling underpants, before decorating the sofa in aviator shades, leather jacket and jeans, while sizing up his prey.
With the benefit of hindsight the play looks remarkably like a sly update of Harold Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party’ – only with Cougar forced to celebrate his birthday by his put upon, older, balder, partner and servant, Captain. There are also traces of Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ in the trashy girly Sherbert Gravel who comes to test Cougar’s patience over the rights to her boyfriend’s wedding tackle. Ridley tries to pull a symbolic rabbit out of the story by wrapping it up with a neat message, but the real pleasure of this piece is not in its existential insights, but in its grubby adolescent sneer.
This is something Tom O’Brien’s production gets absolutely right: Emily Harwood’s design creates a dingy, damp, cracked East End eyrie wherein the characters revel in their depthless, brainless drives. Cougar, originally played by Jude Law, is handled with grim superficiality by a lean, mean Joshua Blake, while Ian Houghton clings to his dignity as his doting skivvy. Dylan Llewellyn is a pawn in Cougar’s game of cat and mouse with Nancy Sullivan’s relentlessly frothy but fierce Sherbet, while Ania Marson provides witchy touches as a weird neighbour whose late husband used to flay animals for fur. A very classy revival of a deeply cynical Nineties relic.
By Patrick Marmion