Philip Ridley continues to go above and beyond in providing Southwark Playhouse, production company Tramp and director Wiebke Green with replacement work for the cancelled Beast of Blue Yonder that was meant to play when the first lockdown came in. And while the venue was among the first out of the gates to get live audiences back in they were also comparatively prepared for things to go tits up again for Lockdown 2: Electric Fuckeroo: I was meant to be in Elephant & Castle in person tonight for Ridley's latest, The Poltergeist, but the limited run was always going to be live-streamed as well, and when the kybosh got put back on live audiences my ticket just got converted to an online one. A shame in the sense that seeing Joseph Potter's performance in an intimate space would no doubt have been an electric experience, but a lot of that power still comes through on screen.Following one of the more memorable The Beast Will Rise monologues in Star, Potter is once again challenged to get an audience onside with a narrator who's initially unsympathetic if not downright repellent: Painkiller-addicted Sasha lives in a tatty East London flat with his endlessly patient boyfriend, who puts up with his wild mood swings and abusive behaviour as, it seems, does pretty much everyone who knows him. He's been persuaded to go to his young niece's birthday party despite his hostility to his brother and sister-in-law, whom he blames for the fact that his promising art career - he'd been predicted to be the next big thing at the age of 15 - crashed and burned. But as the story goes on there appear to be alarming gaps in Sasha's memory that don't just come from his drug problem, and the story he's been telling himself for years may be a long way from the truth.
There's echoes of Radiant Vermin in how the action plays out at a garden party, except with just one actor frantically playing all the roles this time, as well as in the way a story with very dark undercurrents feels perfectly pitched with laugh-out-loud moments. Once again Potter succeeds in bringing layers and watchability to a character who initially appeared pretty unbearable. It still feels like everyone is almost supernaturally patient and forgiving with him, but as we're getting the view from inside Sasha's head it may be that the extremity of his bile isn't anywhere near as apparent from the outside, and everyone else possibly just sees a very quiet, mentally ill man with occasional outbursts.
On a different note, The Poltergeist is interesting as a long-time Ridley fan in the way that it makes a visual artist the central character, referencing the playwright's own art school training. Sasha's coping strategies are rooted in his identity as an artist, as he looks out at the world and breaks it down into paint colours. The play's language also nods at famous works of art across the centuries - "the surface is waterlillies but underneath it's all sharks and formaldehyde." It feels like a peek behind the curtain at the way Ridley's mind uses words like paint on a canvas and constructs the vivid fantastical language his plays are famous for, even if the play's action itself is right at the most down-to-earth, naturalistic end of Ridley's worlds. Characteristically pulse-racing, The Poltergeist just as characteristically nags at you even as we see light at the end of the tunnel: Is the day described in the play a huge breakthrough for Sasha, or has he been through this many times, and will he manage to once again forget all he's learned and externalise his self-loathing again?
The Poltergeist by Philip Ridley is live-streaming until the 21st of November from Southwark Playhouse.
Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes straight through.
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