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.
