Philip Ridley is best known as the screenwriter of The Krays, in which Gary and Martin Kemp played Ronnie and Reggie as a pair of tanned and lisping choirboys. Ridley loves to bang his own gong. And he’s got enough gongs to raise quite a racket. The Smarties Prize, the W.H. Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award, the George Sadoul prize, the best director award at the Porto Film Festival. His action-packed CV even features trophies he nearly won but didn’t: the London Fringe Best Play Award (nominated); the Carnegie Medal (shortlisted). And no London writer has shown more literary potential than Ridley. He remains the only earthling ever to receive the Evening Standard’s ‘most promising’ award in both film and stage categories. How are those promises shaping up? Let’s see.
His new housing crisis play opens with young professional dimwits Jill and Ollie simpering and cooing over their first-born. They admit that their ascent up the property ladder has been a little bizarre. Plucked from a poky one-bedroom flat by a mysterious government agency, they were ushered into a brand-new house on an estate surrounded by grunting vagrants warming themselves at open-air fires.
The house needed new fittings and when they accidentally killed a homeless intruder they found that a refurb had been carried out by magic. Mildly surprised, they began slaughtering tramps and strays until their home boasted every imaginable symbol of suburban opulence including a mint-condition Lamborghini. Great. Now what? Jill and Ollie feel only a twinge of revulsion at their killing spree and the absence of moral coloration inflicts a lot of damage on this daft fable. Are we supposed to sympathise with these apple-cheeked murderers? Not really. To like them? Hardly. To despise them? Not even that, because they mewl and coo at us like a pair of labrador puppies begging for biscuits and a tickle.
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