“this twisted script and Henley’s gut-wrenching execution are plenty to keep us at home one more night, voraciously glued to the screen”
I first encountered Philip Ridley as a teenager, reading Pitchfork Disney, his 1991 play about an agoraphobic brother and sister who survive on chocolate and horror stories of the outside world. I’d never read anything like it; the strange recipe of graphic and often violent subversion coalescing with playful whimsy and childish naivety. Like Roald Dahl on a nasty come-down.
Ridley doesn’t appear to have changed his tune in his newest play, Tarantula, in which we accompany sweet adolescent Toni on her first real date with a boy she really fancies, and then, rather suddenly, through a harrowing near-death attack and the ensuing trauma it inevitably spawns.
Georgie Henley’s performance is rich and complicated. Unlike most trauma narratives, Henley’s Toni never loses her desire to be liked and likeable, and to maintain a sunny disposition. Rather than descending into shadowy darkness, Toni is desperate to see the light, making the story all the more troubling. Her smile stretches wider and wider until we can hardly see her at all, in her place just a manic plea for everything to be okay.
Ridley has also never shied away from casual domestic subversion and he does so with such ease, it feels crass to bring it up. But it also feels important and worthy of applause, so needs must. In this case it’s Toni’s dad who stays at home with the kids, whilst her mum tries her hand at various jobs. Toni’s older brother, a seeming classic trouble maker who, in someone else’s story would likely continue to represent something nasty and unlikeable, reveals depth and an unexpected self-awareness. And it appears that everyone is fairly sexually fluid and suffers no judgement. None of this is dwelled upon at all, which is what makes it so completely refreshing.
The one-woman format with little to no production – flood lighting becomes spotlighting on occasion, and half way through Henley removes a t-shirt to reveal sportswear – has become fairly commonplace in the past year, and understandably so what with theatres having to constantly change their programming to fit with fresh lockdowns and social distancing. Nonetheless it seems quite brave to do this only a couple of weeks before theatres (hopefully) open as usual, when attention spans are at an all-time low and everyone is so desperate to leave the house, we’re sitting outside restaurants in jumpers and coats, huddling beside outdoor heaters and pretending it’s not just started raining.
But Ridley was never going to have a problem holding the audience’s attention and director Wiebke Green clearly knows that. Whilst two hours is quite a lot to ask of an online audience at the moment, this twisted script and Henley’s gut-wrenching execution are plenty to keep us at home one more night, voraciously glued to the screen.
“There is so much charisma and bite on stage, it seems slightly ridiculous that we should be allowed to experience this in such an intimate setting.”
Twenty or so fold-out chairs, scattered two metres apart, surround a small fairy-light-canopied stage, nestled beneath a big old tree at the bottom of the garden. Not quite summer anymore, there’s a significant nip in the air as the sun sets behind us, and the select crowd snuggles in to their jumpers and coats (one couple taking a sneaky swig from a hidden flask- not a bad idea), readying for the show to begin.
It doesn’t get much more picturesque than that, really. And besides the fact the location was likely chosen due to Covid, it feels more like the perfect setting for a small Midsummer Night’s Dream production or Woolf’s pageant in Between The Acts, and the limited audience makes it feel all the more special. Maybe it’s not extra practical for the production, but I’m having a very nice time…
“Why is everything so bland?”, Cesare Borgia (James Corrigan) begins, lamenting the misery and boredom of his princely responsibilities. He yearns for a taste of freedom, and so decides to offer his position and title to a passing unemployed politician, Niccolò Machiavelli (Nicholas Limm) who jumps at the opportunity, while Borgia himself guises as a struggling artist because, as he rightly posits, “The truth is simple: Artists win at life.” Simultaneously, Leonardo da Vinci (Akshay Sharan), similarly sick of his lot, decides to seek something more grounded than the lofty arts and, also disguised, finds a job in the Borgia palace as a politician. Cue a series of hilarious misunderstandings, disguises piled on top of disguises, genders swapped, stations elevated and swiftly demoted.
Writer Charlie Ward packs a lot in: war, politics, religion, romance, gender identity, class disparity, and all in a form that sits somewhere between a bedroom farce and a Shakespearian comedy.
Everything is in rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter (I think?) and just as with a Shakespeare play it takes a little while to find the rhythm, so with Renaissance, the first few scenes of dialogue are largely lost while the audience recalibrates. But it does give the story a pace, and a certain flavour which, being that it’s set in the sixteenth century, feels apt.
Before lockdown, nearly the entire cast was committed to major theatrical projects elsewhere, and you can see why. There is so much charisma and bite on stage, it seems slightly ridiculous that we should be allowed to experience this in such an intimate setting. The physical comedy and timing displayed, combined with everyone’s extensive previous experience with Shakespearian language brings a very comfortable, natural delivery, as though they spent their lives speaking in rhyming couplets. Corrigan whips between silly and domineering with ease; Bethan Cullinane is a force, so quietly sure of herself, she hardly moves whilst somehow absolutely commanding the stage. And Haydn Gwynne is just fabulous. Considering the immediate affect her presence makes on stage, she feels slightly underused, though you might say that of the whole cast really.
Director Emma Butler’s design is massively pared down, a necessity for such a small stage, and a relief really – there’s already enough to focus on with the grandiloquent language, and striking performances: Costumes consist of a simple palette of whites, creams and dusky pinks, and the ‘disguises’ comprise skirts swapped for trousers, shirts rebuttoned disheveledly, and dodgy French accents. It works though, and adds to the comedy, that someone should merely put a hat on and say they’re someone different from the person they were two minutes prior in the same company.
As theatre slowly starts to pick itself up again, even those productions that do manage to cobble something together will likely be taking an artistic hit, having to re-mould themselves in line with government guidelines. On this occasion, though, the restrictions have only enhanced the audience’s experience. How often do we have the chance to enjoy such a concentration of talent in such an intimate setting, and with fresh, new writing? Take the opportunity while you can, before (hopefully) everything returns to some semblance of normality and such an event becomes near impossible.
