Stage-to-screen review: Tarantula

If the last year has seen culture put on pause nobody remembered to tell Philip Ridley - Tarantula is his seventeenth premiere since March 2020. Granted, some of those barely came in at two minutes, but he's given Georgie Henley the monologue equivalent of a marathon, an epic that comes closer to two hours. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a teenage rom-com from the opening, if you didn't know who'd written it, and if narrator Toni didn't abruptly freeze mid-sentence whenever she says her boyfriend Michael's name (and I'm not sure if director Wiebke Green entirely thought out how this would come across on a live stream, or maybe making the audience think the feed had frozen was intentional.) After a meet-cute at a school charity event, the self-conscious and scholarly teenager goes on her first-ever date with a charming boy. Until she looks the wrong way at a man with a spider tattoo and the rom-com abruptly turns into horror.

Theatre review: Angry

Philip Ridley has been particularly interested in monologues in recent years, and following the full-length pair Dark Vanilla Jungle and Tonight with Donny Stixx, and the disembodied voices of Killer, he now puts two actors together to alternate telling six shorter stories. The twist to Angry is that the cast comprises one male and one female actor, but the speeches have been written to be gender-neutral, so at one performance the odd-numbered monologues will be performed by the man and the even-numbered by the woman – Version 1, “She Follows Him” – and at the next they swap roles – Version 2, “He Follows Her.” The latter is the version I saw tonight, with Georgie Henley’s Her opening the show with the titular “Angry,” a disappointingly one-note evocation of that emotion in which her character berates the audience first for staring at her then for ignoring her.