In her first year in charge, Lisa Goldman has re-energised the Soho Theatre with intriguing and, at times, challenging work from Iraq, Poland, even Belarus. Now she renews her collaboration with a creative talent whose play, Leaves of Glass, was the first work she staged at Soho — and whose output has got more rather than less transgressive over the years.
London-born and based Philip Ridley has been a name to conjure with since the early 1990s as a playwright, artist, film-maker and novelist for both adults and children.
Arguably, the generic breadth, not to mention the weirdness of his work — its juxtaposition of beauty, whimsy and horror — has stopped him becoming a household name. He’s probably still best known for his screenplay for Peter Medak’s 1990 film The Krays, starring the Spandau Ballet brothers Martin and Gary Kemp, which won an Evening Standard Award.
But Ridley’s recent stage work has moved away from the knowing, brittle fantasy of early plays such as The Pitchfork Disney towards something harder and nas-tier.
Piranha Heights, commissioned and directed by Goldman, completes a loose trilogy of plays about brothers, alongside Leaves of Glass and Mercury Fur, which was so shocking in its depiction of the debasement and exploitation of childhood that Faber declined to publish it.
Piranha Heights is set in the kind of East End tower block in which Ridley was born. The central relationship is between two brothers, fighting over their dead mother’s flat, but there is also a veiled girl claiming to be an abused asylum seeker, a child that is a doll, and a teenage boy who admits to horrific acts prompted by his imaginary friend (the latter part played by rising star Luke Treadaway).
Encrusted with typically ornate imagery, it’s hard to know how it will work on stage. But one of the exciting things about Soho Theatre these days is that you never know what you are going to get.
From tonight until 14 June. Information: 0870 429 6883.
