Cellar Door Theatre’s revival of Ridley’s contentious gothic tragicomedy gets points for endeavour, but doesn’t connect.
Cellar Door Theatre are taking us back to the heyday of what critic Alex Sierz once termed ‘in-yer-face’ theatre: a mode of bare-knuckle, confrontational performance that’s resolutely out of vogue on the Fringe circuit at the moment – to its detriment, some might say. Phillip Ridley’s Ghost from a Perfect Place kicks off with the return of Travis Flood to his old stomping ground in East London. The self-styled preeminent gentleman-gangster of Bethnal Green in the 60s, Flood is back after a lengthy sojournment in Hollywood (he claims), whereupon he finds the place now in the hands of the Disciples – a gang of young women led by the quasi-deified Rio Sparkes. Seemingly drawn to her power and charisma on a first meeting, Flood’s visit to the flat she shares with her grandmother Torchie catalyses a deluge of traumatic revelations that peel back the halcyon sheen of the aestheticised gangsterism of a bygone era to reveal its poisoned heart.
Even before Portishead and DJ Shadow make their (ever so slightly tacked-on) soundtrack appearances, Ghost from a Perfect Place succeeds in feeling firmly rooted in a 90s mode of punkish earnestness. Director Brittany Rex and co. shirk the post-post-modern flourishes of self-referential snark that typify the space right now (even in revivals), and there’s a refreshing quality to watching a young company full-throatedly commit to a weighty piece without the safety-net of irony beneath them.
But in its execution, it’s fairly wide of the mark. The pacing is fatally languid at times, an effect compounded by a general samey-ness that pervades the piece’s lengthy and admittedly challenging monologues in particular. As the aged, Ozymandias-figure of Flood, Brian Arts manages to ooze a serpentine kind of sociopathy, his prowling physicality and rasping east-end drawl making him every inch the ghost of gangsters past: it’s a solid impression. But it also obscures most of the sly charm and charisma that made Flood who he was, which leaves him seeming more cartoon than tragic antihero. Karen Holly as Torchie never quite reaches escape velocity from a slightly anodyne brand of gentle kookiness, even if fragments of her rose-tinted memories achieve a measure of poignancy. The Disciples are a real hit-and-miss gang. Canitta Hart as Rio has tonnes of presence, but none of the magnetic authority of a nouvelle-prophetess, nor the febrile unpredictability of a young woman born and raised in trauma. Fatima Makhzoum and Maria Anthony (as Disciples Miss Sulphur and Miss Kerosene respectively) bring as much fortissimo energy as they can muster to their zany acolytes, but the problem is that they’re so busy being wacky that they risk functioning as merely screwball comic relief. There’s a lack of depth there that risks trivialising the thematic substructure that the production is trying to establish.
There are absolutely moments in this piece that feel deftly judged and elegantly intuited. Roger Godfrey’s set is clear and extremely well-constructed for a show of this scale; Rex’s staging is almost always watchable and fluid – a few bizarre dramaturgical and stylistic decisions aside. Its greatest asset is undoubtedly Ridley’s language, which, when given space to cut through, conjures a bruising (sur)reality all its own. But in the final estimation, Cellar Door just aren’t quite up to the task on a technical level. Considered as a whole, the piece feels lightweight and bloodless, the characters flat and archetypical – like Brechtian signifiers dropped into a play that demands we experience them as fractured, tortured souls in purgatorial agony. A combination of this same caricaturism and dialogue beats that regularly flirt with playing the gag rather than the moment, hollows out the horror, sadness and grief that seem key to the theatrical world we’re in here. Far from feeling provocative or dangerous, it’s surprisingly tame – with the stakes so underplayed at times that it’s hard to find any of the violence or heartbreak particularly meaningful.
This isn’t to say that Ridley’s brutal thematic preoccupations, his text’s mordant humour, or the frequent detours into trancelike oneirism are easy to manage. On the contrary, it’s notoriously difficult tonal territory to navigate; drawing out GFAPP’s uniquely ghastly vision of an almost spiritualised fetishisation of violent power and lingering trauma is eye-of-the-needle work. Cellar Door have bet on themselves with a challenging undertaking and, never one to discourage risk in fringe spaces, I feel they should be proud of themselves for doing so. But purely on the level of theatrical experience, GFAPP is difficult to connect with emotionally or intellectually, beyond fleeting glimpses of the ghost of a more exciting text haunting the stage.