From last year’s production of City of Angels. Photograph: JK Photography
Audiences will have the opportunity to see Trinity Laban’s talented 2nd and final year students perform two musicals over two weeks this summer – Spend, Spend, Spend (11-13 June) and Lucky Stiff (19-21 June).
Spend, Spend, Spend is the story of Viv Nicholson, a Yorkshire woman who won her fortune on the Football Pools, and charts the tragedy, comedy and love story of Viv’s journey that took her through five husbands, fast cars, bankruptcy and booze.
One week later, final year students perform their graduate show, Lucky Stiff, a musical based on the novel The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. A classic, fast paced musical comedy, Lucky Stiff follows the real life story of an English shoe salesman who must pass off the embalmed body of his recently murdered uncle as alive in order to inherit six million dollars.
Trinity Laban has developed an unparalleled reputation for its unique Musical Theatre performance training experience. Distinctive in preparing creative practitioners equipped with a wide range of skills applicable to a variety of musical theatres roles, Trinity Laban graduates appear in Musical Theatre productions in the West End, international and UK touring productions, and film and TV, as well as within the wider entertainment industry.
So come along to Stratford Circus Arts Centre this June for two award winning musicals, promising two evenings full of laughs and entertainment.
Tackling discrimination: cast members of Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman
Following a tip off, I arrive to meet the playwright Robin Soans, holding a packet of Jaffa Cakes. In Soans’ new play Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage, opening at the Arcola this month, the main character’s mother says she always knows her son’s mood based on his eating habits – when things got bad, she says, he stopped eating Jaffa Cakes: “He can usually eat them by the packet.”
The son in question is Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, who in 2009 came out, bringing a lifetime of denial to an end and beginning the long journey towards acceptance among his fellow professionals.
Accepting a Jaffa Cake and dunking it into a cup of lemon tea, Soans tells me it is domestic detail like this that is so essential in a documentary play: “If you want people to believe the big stuff and go on the big journeys, you’ve got to woo them with the detail,” he says.
The play is about a pioneer. “It’s about someone who did something that had never been done before,” says Soans. During research for the play Thomas admitted that whilst it was a groundbreaking act, it also came with the knowledge that “you have to be prepared to take the shit for it”.
And Thomas did, being ritually insulted on rugby fields around the country in his late career. Six years on, it is his resilience and self-awareness through those dark times that have made him a hero to more than just sport fans, Soans says.
Thomas is very keen for his story to be told – hence persistent rumours of a forthcoming Mickey Rourke film portrayal – but when Soans initially approached him, he was sceptical.
“I think he distrusted the theatre as being exploitative and pretentious, but the first time he saw a run-through in the theatre he was gasping, he was sitting up, it was this absolute recognition.”
On stage Thomas’ personal story is interwoven with that of his hometown of Bridgend, which, around the same time, saw 25 teenage suicides in just two years.
“The two things I never, never try to be are either worthy or grim,” says Soans, “even if it’s a very serious subject.” Instead, with humour and humanity his express intention is, he says, to “reveal a piece of human nature that hasn’t been revealed in that way before.”
Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 20 May – 20 June arcolatheatre.com
Janet Etuk as Grace and Sean O’Callaghan as Phil in Beyond Caring. Photograph: Mark Douet
During the pre-election ‘air battle’, zero-hour contracts were a hot topic. It is timely then that Beyond Caring, a play that peels back political rhetoric to reveal the realities of cleaners working in a meat factory with no fixed hours, has transferred from The Yard in Hackney Wick for a brief run at the National Theatre.
Designed to encourage a flexible labour market, zero-hour contracts force workers to bend over backwards to meet the whims of an employer. If you are young and lucky enough not to fall ill or on hard times – you might survive. But those in Alexander Zeldin’s play are the vulnerable, the poor and the sick.
The action follows three women taken on for a two-week job at a meat factory. They are bolshy Liverpudlian Becky (Victoria Moseley), timid Susan (Kristin Hutchinson) and Grace (Janet Etuk) who has had her disability benefit cut and has been passed fit for work despite having rheumatoid arthritis.
They join Phil (Sean O’Callaghan) a gentle giant type who buries his head in detective fiction and is on a treasured permanent contract, and manager Ian (Luke Clarke).
All the acting is strong but Clarke gives an especially good performance as Ian, the type of manager who thinks an extra 27p an hour and a university degree gives him the right to laud it over his subordinates with fascistic zeal.
He calls team meetings after punishingly long shifts (“I’m not happy guys”), prevents Grace from taking medication and watches porn on his phone all the while spouting an infuriating jumble of self-help clichés and managerial jargon.
Nothing happens, the days pass in a pattern of work and biscuit breaks. This lack of plot is consonant with the sense that there can be little progress for those forced to live in the immediate.
We learn little of the characters’ backstories beyond hints at private tragedy but again this is a reflection on the nature of their work, for how can human connections be forged on such inconstant foundations?
Tension builds as physical exhaustion and pent-up rage pushes the cleaners towards the edge. Grace’s muscles, pushed beyond their capability finally give in and she collapses over the huge concertina-shaped machine. Paste-grey water is sloshed frantically over stainless steel machines, but the stubborn smears of congealed sausage meat will not budge.
The cleaners are presented as ‘invisibles’ (Ian says the staff party will give them a chance to mix with the ‘normal staff’) but 2.3 per cent of the UK’s workforce are on zero-hour contracts. The barman at your local gastropub is probably on one, as is the Sports Direct cashier who sells you a bundle of socks.
What really shocks in this brutal piece of theatre is that legislation that values a business owner’s profit-motive over basic human rights has become so commonplace in modern Britain. Beyond Caring leaves the audience smarting – not just from the pungent smell of sanitiser but from the injustice of it all.
Beyond Caring is at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 23 May nationaltheatre.org.uk
Greg Hicks as Morris Honeyspoon in Clarion. Photograph: Simon Annand
As Clarion – a deeply satirical look at Britain’s press from former tabloid journalist Mark Jagasia – opens at Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, one can’t help but compare it to the successful run of Great Britain in the West End. Where the former was a showy, colourful, big-budget production, Clarion is filthy, dark, hilarious and utterly human.
The play is set in the offices of the Clarion, Britain’s worst newspaper. As the paper comes under fire for its questionable content, leaked to a rival from the inside, the barebones staff descend into hysteria. Some of theatre’s A-list take a turn on the stage here, delivering some devilishly crafted performances as typical tabloid journos.
The first half of the opening act features jarring scene changes as the fade outs slice the action. It lacks subtly – though one feels that’s more about the direction than the script. It improves massively about an hour in, however; what starts out as over-exaggerated stereotyping morphs into a scathing, witty diatribe as the first act picks up tempo and charge.
It’s probing, laden with expletives and with some cracking one-liners. Clare Higgins as long-standing columnist Verity Stokes carries the whole thing, her fading power driving her betrayal, while her editor Morris Honeyspoon, played with shocking acrimony by a remarkable Greg Hicks, is an old-school tyrant. He relentlessly picks on junior staff and vastly overestimates his own opinions, ignorance welded to self-belief.
The staging is remarkably evocative of the exact environment the dialogue musters, despite the limited space, and there’s a palpable sense of unease that only intensifies as the story breaks. It seems as though the ‘traitor in our midst’ trope is very revealing of Jagasia’s role as whistle-blower through the very staging of this production. The severity of the attack is mitigated with raucous humour; the state of Britain scene is one of the funniest in the production, rousing rowdy applause from the audience.
Clarion isn’t dislikeable because it’s a poor production, but because it’s unpleasant to watch – the characters are utterly morally and socially reprehensible, throwing out the question of how deeply we’re manipulated by our own press. Jagasia and Ergen have done a magnificent job in bringing this issue to light; it’s not just satire, it’s a damning reflection of the state of British press and politics. With such an accurate rendering of our reality, it feels wrong to laugh, but as witness to a play of this quality, you won’t be able to help it.
Clarion is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 16 May. arcolatheatre.com
A scene from 2014’s Turfed at Hackney Downs Studios, now Hackney Showroom. Photograph: Hackney Showroom
Hackney’s newest theatre has been shortlisted to win £50,000 in the Jewson Building Better Communities prize.
Hackney Showroom, which officially opened in March, is appealing for public votes and is one of 63 UK-wide nominees for the award for community buildings projects.
Describing itself as offering “bold, exciting theatre for ordinary people”, the Hackney Showroom is a 4,000 square-foot former print works at Hackney Downs Studios.
The venue’s first official production was last month’s Politrix by The Big House, although works by Paines Plough, LIFT and others have been presented in the same space since 2013.
This large, industrial space has now been renovated, but there’s still work needed to complete the interior.
Nina Lyndon, who set up the Hackney Showroom with business partner Sam Curtis Lindsay, said: “We are committed to smashing down the barriers that make some cultural activity off limits for many. This project offers bold, exciting theatre for ordinary people. Affordable, informal and with doors wide open.”
Greg Hicks and Clare Higgins in Clarion. Photograph: Robert Davenport
Playwright Mark Jagasia is used to seeing his work in print, although his new play Clarion, which opens this month at the Arcola, is his first.
That is because Jagasia was for years a tabloid journalist, working as a reporter for the Evening Standard, and later becoming Showbiz Editor of the Daily Express.
So what better subject for his debut play than the state of the British media, set in the office of Britain’s worst newspaper, the Daily Clarion?
“It’s about the ideologies behind the headlines and about the way newspapers are used to further political agendas that readers may not be aware of,” Jagasia explains.
As well as the press, Clarion takes aim at the rise of nationalism globally, UKIP, and the “general ominous sense that’s in the air at the moment”. It’s main weapon in doing so, however, is humour. “I was trying to write a ferocious comedy about quite a serious subject, says Jagasia. “I think the best way to tackle that is through comedy – sugaring the pill.”
For a debut play, Clarion boasts some big name actors. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Greg Hicks is monomaniacal editor Morris Honeyspoon, who rules the newsroom with an iron fist, while Olivier Award- winning actor and Dr Who star Clare Higgins plays “washed up foreign correspondent” Verity Stokes.
“It’s not based on a particular newspaper,” insists Jagasia, “but anecdotes I heard do inform the background. There are some extraordinary characters in newsrooms. And the editor is not based on one specific person but on a specific type of monster.”
Clarion took its first steps towards being staged when it was spotted by the Arcola’s Playwrought new writing festival, where new plays are premiered as rehearsed readings. For it to be picked up, then staged, is itself no mean feat, but the story of how Jagasia managed to snag two such experienced actors for his first play has even more of a fairytale ring to it.
Around 13 years ago at the Globe, Jagasia met Mark Rylance at an afterparty. Rylance advised Jagasia to leave tabloid journalism and get a job in theatre. When that finally happened, and Jagasia was struggling to find a home for Clarion, he decided to send the play to Mark Rylance.
“I didn’t know anyone in the theatre at all, so I sent it to his dressing room on spec and he really loved the play and opened a lot of doors for it,” Jagasia says.
Jagasia gave up working as a newspaper hack more than five years ago. What does he miss most, I ask.
“Probably the wild parties. I was the showbiz editor so I moved in the showbiz world,” he says, before adding: “Probably the humour actually. The gallows humour in newsrooms would be hair-raising if it was put down in black and white, but if you lived through it there was quite a camaraderie about the tabloid press that’s largely disappeared now.”
Not that Jagasia has any time to mope about the decline of Fleet Street. Although Clarion is yet to open, a follow up is already on the cards. “I’m sat with a towel around my head trying to write the next one,” he tells me, as our phone conversation draws to a close. “The moment you have any degree of success you think you’re going to bask in it but you’re not. Suddenly it’s all about the next play. So back to work basically.”
Clarion is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL 15 April – 16 May arcolatheatre.com
Hannah Moss in So it Goes at Iron Belly, Underbelly Edinburgh. Photograph: Richard Davenport
The journey towards Hannah Moss creating her critically-acclaimed debut theatre show started the day her dad died. For many years she was unable to verbalise or even acknowledge the grief she had suffered, aged 17, when her father passed away.
At university she had tried to write a play about the experience, but couldn’t quite find her voice. She wanted to go into the theatre professionally but wasn’t quite sure about how to approach that either.
Through her collaboration with fellow theatre maker David Ralfe and a chance encounter with a production at the Edinburgh Fringe she finally found the language to express herself.
Almost entirely without the spoken word, So It Goes tells the story of Hannah coming to terms with her father’s death. Revelling in his eccentricities and recounting fond memories, the narrative unravels through mime, movement and a mini whiteboard hanging around Hannah’s neck. “I’ve become very good at writing upside down,” she says.
The play’s title is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In the novel, death is always followed by the phrase ‘so it goes’, acknowledging it as a natural part of the cycle of life, with the same reassuring tone we might recognise in ‘c’est la vie’.
The first time Hannah spoke properly with her mother and family about her dad was after the show’s first performance. Referring to scenes in the play they found they could finally ask one another how it felt when certain moments occurred. “It was like there was this third thing to talk about,” Hannah says.
Through the prism of the play, Hannah began to communicate with her family, coming to terms with her own grief and now able to celebrate her father’s life.
Glowing reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe have prompted a national tour for So It Goes, which this month comes to Shoreditch Town Hall. It’s a tour which kicked off on Merseyside – where Hannah’s dad grew up.
Hannah has described the show as “my way of saying goodbye”, adding that: “It was fitting that Merseyside was the first show we did.”
So It Goes is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT from 8–18 April
Wendy (Nadége René) in Politrix. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
In the Big House Theatre’s latest play Politrix, the embers of the London riots are still glowing.
This punchy piece of theatre, directed by Maggie Norris, explores the widening gulf between the halls of parliament and a swathe of inner-city youth once branded a “feral underclass” by its members.
With the exception of Ben Lambert who plays Conservative politician CJ, all the cast members are part of Big House Theatre’s 12-week drama programme aimed at getting care leavers from the ages of 18-23 involved in theatre.
The plot follows a Tory MP dragging a group of six young people on a whistlestop Westminster tour. Verbatim recordings of the cast’s own trip to the House of Commons are woven into Ben Musgrave’s script, making their voices audible above the legislators that claim to speak for them.
Determined to use the occasion to her advantage, Monroe (Camilla Ferdinand) asks CJ for help in getting her brother out of prison where he was sent for being present at the scene of a gang murder – a joint enterprise conviction.
He dithers before declining. “You saw me come in here with my bag of dog-eared papers and you thought: fuck”, she accuses him scornfully.
For Monroe’s friends, the environment of pomp and privilege is oppressive, and the halls of power morph into a dystopian house of horrors.
An ashen-faced Margaret Thatcher (another turn for Lambert, now in drag) rises from the dead and attacks Leo (Shane Cameron) and Wendy (Nadège René) for being a product of the ‘something for nothing’ culture of the welfare state.
Soldiers march past and security guards perform the rituals of stop and search. Authority is everywhere they turn. Respite is found in the chapel where kindred spirits lurk, suffragettes and revolutionaries, whose tales help to soothe the young friends’ jangled nerves.
With its concrete floors and high ceiling, the all-new Hackney Showroom is an ambitious space and the acoustics are tricky to control – ironic in a play about the struggles of being heard.
But the cast rises to the challenge and it would be hard to pick out a standout performance from the wealth of fresh young talent on display. From the entertaining Fizz (Auzelina Pinto) to the angry K (Moses Gomes-Santos), each character has formidable presence.
After the play I ask 22-year-old Kieran Roach, who gives an affecting performance as the quiet Rico, about the anger that runs throughout the piece. “It’s not anger, it’s frustration,” he gently corrects me, “frustration that we are not being listened to”.
Politrix gives a voice to those who were the collateral of the 2011 chaos. For politicians puzzling over how to build bridges with Britain’s youth it should be compulsory viewing.
Politrix is at Hackney Showroom, Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT until 11 April.
Robert Mountford as Macbeth. Photograph: Talula Sheppard
Any rendition of a classic as widely known and cherished as Macbeth is not easy to pull off without becoming just more throwaway theatre fodder. Harder still is to reimagine said play across modern-day cultures and current cultural politics. Yet, Black Theatre Live – a pioneering consortium of eight regional theatres committed to increasing the amount of black, Asian and minority ethnic theatre – is trying to do just that.
Led by Tara Arts, a theatre company with over 35 years of experience, this new production is the artistic creation of director Jatinda Verma, who is confident there are fewer cultural barriers than it might seem at first glance.
“Shakespeare creates two worlds in Macbeth, the normal world of the living, and that of the witches. Asians share the same dichotomy of worlds split between England and back home,” Verma tells me over the phone.
“I have seen this play through Asian eyes. Of course I am wary of the Christian sensibility, but certainly all faiths have a sense of good and evil. And that’s what this play is working on, when goodness turns to evil.”
Verma first set up Tara with a group of friends in 1977 after the racist murder of a boy in Southall. “We were concerned about why those kinds of racist attacks were happening and also what our own lives were now becoming in Britain. We wanted to not only critique what was happening outside of our lives, but also the discrimination within.” This two-fold purpose exists today and Verma suggests it’s more relevant now than ever.
“One of the inevitable things of migrants is they go in search of who they are and try to make sense of the world they’re in as well as the world they’ve come from, and that carries with it a natural tendency to examine their roots – a purity of culture. It relates to fundamentalism where an attempt to purify culture tips over the edge and turns completely fascist,” warns Verma. This same evil overcomes Macbeth during his bloody path to the throne as a result of his search for purity, prophesied by the witches.
Finding cultural equivalents for characters wasn’t the hard part according to Verma. The witches are interpreted as Hijras, marginalised communities in India that identify themselves as transgender or ‘third gender’. “Like the witches, they carry a whole world which is their own. They have a past that dates back to antiquity, and still exist today, so they don’t stick to a particular time – they’re timeless.”
The biggest challenge was to honour the text and appreciate its musicality admits the director. Yet Verma’s underlying passion for diversity in theatre and creating new opportunities to appreciate these works is clear: “Asian artists shouldn’t feel like they can’t enter into the great arts of the world. All the works belong to our shared heritage. Our duty, then, is to pay respect to whatever classic and bring something of ourselves to it – not to demean, but enhance it.”
Macbeth is at Stratford Circus, Theatre Square, E15 1BX from 26–28 March stratford-circus.com
Sean Verey and Gemma Whelan star in Radiant Vermin at Soho theatre. Photograph: Anna Soderblom
Philip Ridley is not an artist who aims to please. For over two decades he has been writing plays lauded for their lyricism yet reviled for their subject matter. An East End gangster tortured by a gang of girls, child murder, characters who eat cockroaches – nothing is off limits. So the choice of housing as the subject of his latest play, Radiant Vermin, seems comparatively tame. What could be controversial about that?
The play, which opens this month at Soho Theatre, is a comic satire about a young couple desperate to buy a house, and the lengths they are prepared to go to make their home ownership dreams a reality. What those lengths are, one shudders to speculate.
“It’s more an exploration of capitalism and consumerism, that we’re never satisfied in the West and are endlessly wanting to buy buy buy,” explains Ridley amiably over the phone. “So this young couple manage to get the offer of a house, but then you’ve got to furnish it and then you’ve got a baby on the way.”
Moving house ‘trauma’
Now 50, Ridley has a long and varied CV. Radiant Vermin is his 11th stage play for adults. He is also a successful filmmaker, a children’s author and visual artist. His plays are usually set or inspired by East London, where most of them were written. Born and raised in Bethnal Green, Ridley lived in the same flat on Temple Street for most of his life. When he decided to move out last year, mid-housing boom, the trauma of the experience sparked the idea that became Radiant Vermin.
“It’s was like going to war,” he recalls, “this maelstrom of estate agents and solicitors and surveyors. But out of it came an idea of what might happen if someone was offered a process of buying a house that was easier than what I had gone through.”
The experience made Ridley sit up to what was happening to his beloved Bethnal Green. Needing more space so he could start painting again, he found he could not afford the area where he grew up, where all his family had lived, a place he describes as being “in my bloodstream”.
“No one who wants to move out of a local area in East London can afford to stay in that area. And there’s this thing now where you’ve got places with a ten-foot-high iron gate around them, because they are right next door to a council estate where people have got nothing. It reminds me of Hollywood, where you’ve got huge film stars living in villas, and then you go two streets away and you’ve got slums – and that’s an explosion waiting to happen.”
Shock tactics
Whether Radiant Vermin, in its own way, causes an explosion, remains to be seen – though it wouldn’t be the first time. The words ’cause celebre’ have been used to describe Ridley’s work more than most, ever since a charcoal drawing he made as a student, of a man ejaculating a black bird, sent minor shock waves through the art establishment when it was shown at the ICA. Ridley knows the charge sheet well. His third play, Ghost from a Perfect Place, includes a scene where an old gangster is tortured with lighted cigarettes by a girl gang. The Guardian‘s Michael Billington described it as “degrading and quasi-pornographic”. Then there’s Mercury Fur, most controversial of all, a play denounced as “poisonous” by the Daily Telegraph, in which a child is sadistically murdered for entertainment. But the accusation that Ridley is out to shock is something he has always denied.
“If something ends up being shocking it’s because it’s come out of being real. You cannot predict what’s going to cause outrage with an audience. This idea that it can be contrived … that’s not the way the artistic process works. It’s like dreaming. I sit down and I dream the next play. I’m not in control of it in that sense. And then it receives another life when people start to talk about it.”
While Ridley is at the stage now of being more revered than reviled, it is interesting to look back at the vehemence of his detractors. The fevered response to Mercury Fur saw one critic accuse Ridley of being “turned on by his own sick fantasies”, and in 2010, his play Moonfleece, about the rise of the BNP, was banned by Dudley Council. But Ridley argues this says more about how we view theatre, than about his particular brand of it.
“No one goes around saying Cronenberg is a sick human being, or that Tarantino wants to go out and kill someone, you know? In every other art form there’s not that link made, but in theatre there’s still an echo of that Victorian moral values thing, that it should be edifying, a medicine that people are taking. There’s still a patrician sort of etiquette that hangs over it, almost like the subject matter dictates what the thing is.”
Philip Ridley: “No one goes around saying Cronenberg is sick, or that Tarantino want to go out and kill someone”
Ridley points to the double standards applied to the classic plays. In King Lear, a man’s eyes are pulled out; in Medea a woman eats her own children. Their standing is never questioned, we stress their continuing relevance. Yet Ridley’s plays, for claiming to represent the present day, seem more dangerous.
“You sit through a play like Mercury Fur and people say this could never happen, and of course we’ve been through times where that has now happened. No artist wants to die with it written on their tombstone that he or she pleased the critics. I mean that’s the least of my ambitions really.”
Solitary child
Ridley’s determination to stick out may, psychologically, stem from his childhood, which was dominated by chronic asthma, a condition that was not easily treated at the time. He missed a lot of school, and was in and out of hospital and in oxygen tents until he was 13.
“As a result I was a very solitary child. I didn’t really have any friends so that meant that I was sitting up in bed, reading and writing. My interior life had to become my company, because I had no peers of my own. I grew up conversing with adults more than I conversed with other children.”
When Ridley did finally go to school, he was the weird one, a boy who didn’t know how to have a conversation with children his own age. They called him ‘Alien’, and looking back, he says, he can see he was in a very “down state”. Nevertheless, he was high achieving, and when the time came he faced a 50-50 decision of studying English Literature or Art at university. He chose art.
“Going to art school saved me really. St Martin’s at the time was such a thrilling place to be, it was a very exciting, dynamic place. I knew I could always read books and study books, but I couldn’t always get into a lithographic studio or an etching studio and have access to models to paint.”
All rounder
Inevitably, our conversation turns to being a multi-disciplinary artist. As a playwright, Ridley is credited with kicking off In Yer Face theatre, as a visual artist he’s up there with the YBAs. Which is not to mention filmmaking and fiction writing. And song-writing. It’s a subject that fascinates journalists, though Ridley less so.
“It seems to be something that either bothers or interests people more than it does me, he says. “In its most simplistic sense I’m just telling stories. If I think of a story and see two people talking to each other then it’s obviously a stage play. If I think of a story and its images are moving, and there’s not much dialogue then that’s usually a film. If I think of a story and it’s a sequence of images, then that’s either a photograph or a painting. For me they’re not different things at all, they’re all part of the same mountain but just different peaks at the top.”
Lack of affordable housing is a defining feature of our times, especially in East London. Bearing this context in mind, is Radiant Vermin a state of the nation – or state of East London – play? “That’s not for me to say,” he responds coyly. Ridley’s modesty and refusal to look too deeply into the creative process appear to be characteristic traits. Once in an interview he said he admired artists who had a “signature style”, such as Alfred Hitchcock. How would he describe his own signature style?
“I don’t think I have one,” he responds. “Other people tell me I have but I’m not aware of it, and I think that’s right. I don’t want to go into writing the next stage play knowing I’m writing the next play by me. I just want to see where it takes me. It’s the duty of every artist to assassinate themselves every now and then. You’ve just got to kill everything and start all over really.”
Radiant Vermin is at Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1D 3NE from 10 March– 12 April sohotheatre.com
