Philip Ridley is not for the fainthearted. He is one of the most brilliant writers around today. He has a savage turn of phrase and yet his words are beautiful. Violent and vulnerable. I expected him to be a tough, monosyllabic, East End Londoner and found a young, mild-mannered, voluble, fun man with no hint of an East End accent at all. After a couple of hours talking to him, this anomaly made perfect sense. There seems to be more than one Philip Ridley - there's the artist, the children's author, the photographer, the playwright, the film director and the Alien.
I shall elaborate.
He lives, and has always lived in the East End of London. He grew up with a family that had no interest in any form of the arts at all. No painting, no books, no theatre; and yet all he wanted to do was draw pictures and write stories. "My mum always said that the only way to keep me happy as a child was to give me a pencil and paper. I never wanted toys".
He did want comics though. "I avidly read Marvel comics. I still do! Spiderman is the best superhero. X-Men were also my favourites - depending on the mood I was in! The X-Men were the first mutants - I always felt like I was a mutant too, so I felt particularly close to them. There was also something compelling about the isolation of Spiderman and the struggle about whether he was good or bad. I was also fascinated by Sherlock Holmes and then Horror and Science Fiction. The iconography of horror writing and films has always played a big part in my work".
At this stage in his life he defined himself as an artist, and went on to study art at St Martin's School of Art in the West End of London. Here is where his affair with theatre began. Part of his degree course was to perform Live Art - which meant getting up in front of an audience and delivering a monologue. He started developing fast-paced monologues which quickly became popular, and he performed them at clubs in London and eventually in New York too. "These monologues gradually evolved into pieces of drama. Initially I was the one who performed them and later other people did". These "pieces of drama" were to become his first stage play - The Pitchfork Disney.
By 1991, when The Pitchfork Disney was performed, Mr Ridley already had under his belt a number of short stories, novels and a couple of screenplays - one of which was The Krays (1990 movie about twin mafia brothers in London starring The Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet). This self-confessed loner who likes nothing better than solitude - unplugging his phone, blacking out his windows and sitting at home writing - has to date amassed an impressive collection of screenplays, novels for adults and children and full length plays. As well as a couple of photography exhibitions and a smörgåsbord of awards and prizes.
His fifth adult stage play is Mercury Fur which has been hailed as his most controversial play yet. This play, which will be staged in Malta by Unifaun Theatre next month, drags us right into the heart of a post-apocalyptic mess. Surely though, Mr Ridley must have known that this play with its extreme fantasies about sex and death, would provoke such outrage? And if this is true, then is this what drove him to write it? "Hand on heart this is not the case. I was never purposely provocative. I don't think you can deliberately set out to be that provocative. How an audience and critics are going to react to a play is completely unpredictable. I sit down to write and follow the natural course of a story. I don't predict the ending. It's just like painting - I get canvas and paints and see what develops. I just let the characters take over - it seems honest to pursue that line."
"Of course when I was getting to the end of writing the play, I knew that I had something potentially controversial but I didn't set out to do that. And no one could have predicted just how controversial it had become. There wasn't a newspaper or magazine that didn't have something to say about it."
So, how provocative was it?
Well, it is reported that at least 10 people walked out of the theatre every night - unable to stomach the violence portrayed on stage. "The reaction upset me. I'm still upset about it. I don't think people saw it for what it was. My publisher - Faber and Faber - refused to publish it. It was like going back to the days of lady Chatterley's Lover. As I was on the phone with Faber telling me that they will not be publishing it because of the cruelty to children in this play, on the TV in the background I was watching the news about a Russian school which was taken over by terrorists - the Beslan Siege. In real life soldiers were killing hundreds of children and yet I was being told that my play was too extreme. I must say that it was a kind of perverse thrill that we sold out in London for the entire run. I think this is because the play tapped in to a younger audience who read between the lines and found something that they can relate to."
"There was a poll taken in this country and around 90 per cent of people under 18 years of age didn't know Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and the Vietnam War. Young people don't know their history and Mercury Fur hit a nerve for them as it deals with memory and fantasy and a culture of violence and amorality. They really understood the play and didn't focus on the controversy."
The starting point of Mercury Fur was a conversation Mr Ridley had with a couple of rich city boy friends of his who have made a lot of money over the past decade.
"They were out celebrating buying a new yacht or something and I went to meet them at a bar. One of them started talking about how being rich meant that he was able to get more of the porn he was after and I was intrigued. What sort of porn was he after? He said that there is some very violent filming about tribes in Rwanda and this took my breath away. The raping of women and killing of children had taken on a sexual undertone for him. People were seeking out this stuff. I was so disturbed that the normal kind of bloke you have a drink in a bar with had this sadistic streak you'd never even dream of. The entrepreneur who has it all - money and a girlfriend - is now searching for his ultimate thrill which is in essence a snuff movie. Now that he is rich enough to get away with it - he wanted it. And that was the birth of one of the characters in the play."
"When the play was put on in Chicago it coincided with three or four American soldiers in Iraq being filmed raping and killing a small child and her family. So suddenly Mercury Fur didn't seem a million miles away from reality. The idea that someone would go out and callously kill a child no longer seemed impossible. These American soldiers until three weeks before Iraq, were all American Idaho farm boys - and suddenly they are child rapists within six weeks. If you take away our moral compass - the result is Mercury Fur. I don't think anyone who will watch this play will accuse me of being a fantasist. Beheadings online, rape, bombings, war - we've now seen too much of what we are capable of."
"Mercury Fur is a dark and shocking play but at its heart it's a play about love and a group of people who discover morality. It's about how the human instinct will discover love and morality."
Where do his demons come from? "I said recently that I open my window and demons fly in. I don't chase them away - I make them welcome. My mum says that I was never like a little child. I was like Damien from the Omen - I used to sit in a corner and watch other children. I was always a seriously tense, frowny observer and used to freak family members out. My school nickname was Alien - people always saw me as the outsider and the loner. I'm always confused by the world. Living is chaos. I don't understand the world - how it works. I don't understand relationships and why things happen. So I find things that help me make sense of it all. And that's art. Making sense of the chaos."
• Mercury Fur will be staged by Unifaun Productions at the MITP Theatre in Valletta on February 1, 2 and 3 and February 8, 9 and 10. Tickets may be obtained from St James Cavalier by phone on 2122 3216 or by e-mail boxoffice@ sjcav.org
I shall elaborate.
He lives, and has always lived in the East End of London. He grew up with a family that had no interest in any form of the arts at all. No painting, no books, no theatre; and yet all he wanted to do was draw pictures and write stories. "My mum always said that the only way to keep me happy as a child was to give me a pencil and paper. I never wanted toys".
He did want comics though. "I avidly read Marvel comics. I still do! Spiderman is the best superhero. X-Men were also my favourites - depending on the mood I was in! The X-Men were the first mutants - I always felt like I was a mutant too, so I felt particularly close to them. There was also something compelling about the isolation of Spiderman and the struggle about whether he was good or bad. I was also fascinated by Sherlock Holmes and then Horror and Science Fiction. The iconography of horror writing and films has always played a big part in my work".
At this stage in his life he defined himself as an artist, and went on to study art at St Martin's School of Art in the West End of London. Here is where his affair with theatre began. Part of his degree course was to perform Live Art - which meant getting up in front of an audience and delivering a monologue. He started developing fast-paced monologues which quickly became popular, and he performed them at clubs in London and eventually in New York too. "These monologues gradually evolved into pieces of drama. Initially I was the one who performed them and later other people did". These "pieces of drama" were to become his first stage play - The Pitchfork Disney.
By 1991, when The Pitchfork Disney was performed, Mr Ridley already had under his belt a number of short stories, novels and a couple of screenplays - one of which was The Krays (1990 movie about twin mafia brothers in London starring The Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet). This self-confessed loner who likes nothing better than solitude - unplugging his phone, blacking out his windows and sitting at home writing - has to date amassed an impressive collection of screenplays, novels for adults and children and full length plays. As well as a couple of photography exhibitions and a smörgåsbord of awards and prizes.
His fifth adult stage play is Mercury Fur which has been hailed as his most controversial play yet. This play, which will be staged in Malta by Unifaun Theatre next month, drags us right into the heart of a post-apocalyptic mess. Surely though, Mr Ridley must have known that this play with its extreme fantasies about sex and death, would provoke such outrage? And if this is true, then is this what drove him to write it? "Hand on heart this is not the case. I was never purposely provocative. I don't think you can deliberately set out to be that provocative. How an audience and critics are going to react to a play is completely unpredictable. I sit down to write and follow the natural course of a story. I don't predict the ending. It's just like painting - I get canvas and paints and see what develops. I just let the characters take over - it seems honest to pursue that line."
"Of course when I was getting to the end of writing the play, I knew that I had something potentially controversial but I didn't set out to do that. And no one could have predicted just how controversial it had become. There wasn't a newspaper or magazine that didn't have something to say about it."
So, how provocative was it?
Well, it is reported that at least 10 people walked out of the theatre every night - unable to stomach the violence portrayed on stage. "The reaction upset me. I'm still upset about it. I don't think people saw it for what it was. My publisher - Faber and Faber - refused to publish it. It was like going back to the days of lady Chatterley's Lover. As I was on the phone with Faber telling me that they will not be publishing it because of the cruelty to children in this play, on the TV in the background I was watching the news about a Russian school which was taken over by terrorists - the Beslan Siege. In real life soldiers were killing hundreds of children and yet I was being told that my play was too extreme. I must say that it was a kind of perverse thrill that we sold out in London for the entire run. I think this is because the play tapped in to a younger audience who read between the lines and found something that they can relate to."
"There was a poll taken in this country and around 90 per cent of people under 18 years of age didn't know Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and the Vietnam War. Young people don't know their history and Mercury Fur hit a nerve for them as it deals with memory and fantasy and a culture of violence and amorality. They really understood the play and didn't focus on the controversy."
The starting point of Mercury Fur was a conversation Mr Ridley had with a couple of rich city boy friends of his who have made a lot of money over the past decade.
"They were out celebrating buying a new yacht or something and I went to meet them at a bar. One of them started talking about how being rich meant that he was able to get more of the porn he was after and I was intrigued. What sort of porn was he after? He said that there is some very violent filming about tribes in Rwanda and this took my breath away. The raping of women and killing of children had taken on a sexual undertone for him. People were seeking out this stuff. I was so disturbed that the normal kind of bloke you have a drink in a bar with had this sadistic streak you'd never even dream of. The entrepreneur who has it all - money and a girlfriend - is now searching for his ultimate thrill which is in essence a snuff movie. Now that he is rich enough to get away with it - he wanted it. And that was the birth of one of the characters in the play."
"When the play was put on in Chicago it coincided with three or four American soldiers in Iraq being filmed raping and killing a small child and her family. So suddenly Mercury Fur didn't seem a million miles away from reality. The idea that someone would go out and callously kill a child no longer seemed impossible. These American soldiers until three weeks before Iraq, were all American Idaho farm boys - and suddenly they are child rapists within six weeks. If you take away our moral compass - the result is Mercury Fur. I don't think anyone who will watch this play will accuse me of being a fantasist. Beheadings online, rape, bombings, war - we've now seen too much of what we are capable of."
"Mercury Fur is a dark and shocking play but at its heart it's a play about love and a group of people who discover morality. It's about how the human instinct will discover love and morality."
Where do his demons come from? "I said recently that I open my window and demons fly in. I don't chase them away - I make them welcome. My mum says that I was never like a little child. I was like Damien from the Omen - I used to sit in a corner and watch other children. I was always a seriously tense, frowny observer and used to freak family members out. My school nickname was Alien - people always saw me as the outsider and the loner. I'm always confused by the world. Living is chaos. I don't understand the world - how it works. I don't understand relationships and why things happen. So I find things that help me make sense of it all. And that's art. Making sense of the chaos."
• Mercury Fur will be staged by Unifaun Productions at the MITP Theatre in Valletta on February 1, 2 and 3 and February 8, 9 and 10. Tickets may be obtained from St James Cavalier by phone on 2122 3216 or by e-mail boxoffice@ sjcav.org