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.

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise -Cactus / Rosewater

The last time I caught up with The Beast Will Rise, the fourteenth play in the series, Cactus, had had its online premiere postponed, taking the opportunity of one of last year's brief returns of live performance to debut in front of an audience instead. I hadn't looked at Tramp's YouTube page for a while, but with Philip Ridley's first new work of 2021 coming soon I had a look, and it seems that Cactus had quietly arrived online a few months ago, along with a new fifteenth instalment. Ridley's monologue cycle for Zoom, directed by Wiebke Green, was something of an underrated epic of the first lockdown - you can read my reviews of the first, second and third sets of monologues I watched, and I think this fourth one will be the last... but with a playwright as prolific as Ridley you never know when something else might pop up.

Stage-to-screen review: The Poltergeist

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.

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Star / Night / Puzzle / Snow

It's been a while since I checked in with Philip Ridley and his lockdown monologue collection: That's because I've been watching them in groups of four or five playlets (you can also read my reviews of the first and second sets) and I'd been waiting for all fourteen to become available before winding the reviews up. But production company Tramp are among those dipping a toe back into live performance, and a final monologue called Cactus appears to be being saved to premiere live. So maybe that'll eventually surface on YouTube as well and I could give that a quick review, but in the meantime parts 10-13 of the sequence feature another one of the somewhat longer speeches, followed by a trio of very short snapshots. They've got a tough act to follow as the 30-minute opener Star is frantically memorable.

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Wound / Telescope / River / Eclipse / Performance

Back to Coronavirus, lockdown and isolation as seen through the uniquely, romantically twisted viewpoint of Philip Ridley, as I go back for a second selection of online premiere monologues in his The Beast Will Rise series (my review of the first four is here.) The next five feature both the longest and the shortest so far, and while most of them can be seen as having a specific significance to the circumstances under which they've debuted, they all could easily remain interesting taken out of context. Probably the least obviously tied to the theme of lockdown is Wound, in which Mirren Mack gives us a journey into a troubled mind in pain, escape into both self-harm and fantasy worlds, but also a resilience that keeps her coming back to reality. A few months into lockdown and everything being done on Zoom has become visually boring, but director Wiebke Green gives Wound  its own identity with a stark clinical whiteness and maintaining an extreme close-up on Mack's face that heightens the sense of anxiety.

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Gators / Zarabooshka / Chihuahua / Origami

A lot of exciting-sounding shows got cancelled or postponed for the current lockdown, but some losses hurt more than others; a new Philip Ridley play is always something to look forward to and the blurb for The Beast of Blue Yonder made it sound like a particularly crazy, epic ride. Let's hope it's not too long after Southwark Playhouse reopens that they reschedule it, but in the meantime Ridley lost no time providing an alternative. And frankly, who better to whip up something for quarantine out of nowhere than a writer who deals in the apocalyptic as his bread and butter? With The Beast of Blue Yonder's production company Tramp, director Wiebke Green, and intended cast, he's put together The Beast Will Rise, a series of 14 monologues for the actors to record in their own homes, released on a weekly basis. But I couldn't wait that long for the whole set to be available so I'm going to be catching up with it every few weeks, beginning with the first four.