The dark imagination of Philip Ridley

Sequestered in a tower block in a cocoon of earplugs and drawn curtains, reclusive writer Philip Ridley is not shy of engaging with harsh realities in his work, writes PETER CRAWLEY

‘WHEN YOU talk to him and hear his voice,” says director Sophie Motley, fondly, of Philip Ridley, “you won’t have expected him to have written all of those sick things. He’s the sort of man that will smile at you quite sweetly, and say: ‘I feel it in my sick and twisted bones.’”

Actually, it's hard to know what to expect of Philip Ridley. As the English dramatist behind The Pitchfork Disney, The Fastest Clock in the Universeand, more recently, the hotly debated Mercury Fur,he has created an East End London tinged with the surreal and pulsating with dark, disturbing fantasies. As an author he has written both adult fiction and children's novels, which, combined with his success as a screenwriter and film-maker, makes him the only person to have written dialogue for both the notorious Kray brothers (1990's The Krays) and the marginally less threatening character of Poppy Picklesticks. And then there are his poetry, his photography, his paintings . . .

When we do talk, Ridley – a generous, articulate and unfailingly polite speaker – is at home in the Bethnal Green tower block where he has lived since his birth in 1967. He rarely leaves it. He keeps the phone disconnected unless he is given advance notice, and prefers to sequester himself in his small living space, working in a cocoon of wax earplugs and drawn curtains.

"Absolutely," he says with bright contentment when asked if he's a shut-in. " Desert Island Discs. Locked away. Seeing no one . . . I'm getting more reclusive as I get older. I think I was very reclusive as a child, because I suffered very badly from asthma. I was alone by necessity, and you lose the ability to socialise. I was really dysfunctional through most of my teens. My mates would say I still am. I think there is an element of me that likes solitude and likes to lock myself away."

And yet, as an artist, Ridley must occasionally look out. In his most recent film, Heartless, in which an East End boy makes a pact with a demon, the character remarks: "I open the window and madness flies in." Those words might serve as Ridley's motto.

“The world confuses me completely,” he admits. “I don’t understand the world or how people can do what they do. In a way, the stories that I write are a way of finding rituals to try and make sense of it all.”

Vincent River, first performed in 2000 and now presented by Belfast's Prime Cut Productions in association with Belfast Pride Festival, is one such attempt to give a redemptive meaning to an otherwise senseless horror.

Forsaking the in-yer-face absurdity and distended reality of much of his other dramatic works, it is an intense two-hander between an alcoholic and troubled mother, Anita, who has lost her son to a homophobic hate crime, and Davey, the damaged soul who discovered his body. Its director, Sophie Motley, whose pungent version of The Pitchfork Disneyat the Dublin Fringe Festival heralded a striking talent in 2006, recognises its differences within Ridley's oeuvre (it's one of his few plays that can't be described as "post-apocalyptic"), while remaining entranced by the sulphurous quality of its language, rhythm and imagery.

“It does the same thing that a lot of his other plays do,” she says. “It forces the audience to use their imaginations.”

Motley agrees that such vivid qualities help avoid the arid worthiness of an issue drama. Vincent River is instead a much richer meditation on grief, sexuality and family, while depicting a hostile society in which people are forced into the shadows and desire and danger become tragically entwined.

For Ridley, who based his story on the murder of a friend in the 1980s, the play is about people who go against “the pack” and how the pack destroys them. “It’s very distressing to me that the play is still relevant,” he says. “One would have hoped that the homophobia in the play would have lost focus. Unfortunately, we’re on a planet where we’ve seen a rise in homophobic attacks, not a diminishing. And that is absolutely petrifying.”

For all his dark imaginings, Ridley finds more genuine horror in dark alleys and battlefields, in public toilets and war zones. When Mercury Furcaused an uproar in 2005, it was not because it depicted violence, but rather that it imagined a society in moral collapse, where a young gang would facilitate the worst fantasies of the rich – including the murder of a 10-year-old child. Looking back, it seems that Ridley was vilified in the press for conducting a thought experiment (one reviewer went so far as to say that Ridley was "turned on by his own sick fantasies"). But though he admits he pushed the dramatic situation to an extreme, Ridley found nothing in his imagination as appalling as newspaper reports of barbarities in Rwanda or Iraq.

"Anyone who says Mercury Furis an exaggeration, I would just point them in that direction," he says. "That makes Mercury Furlook like Mary Poppins, and it scares me to pieces."

All of which can make one wonder if Ridley has much faith in the world outside his window, or if he feels that society is condemned to degenerate into madness.

“It’s just the opposite,” he says passionately. “We mustn’t make the mistake that because you’re dealing with dark subject matter it’s because you’re pessimistic. Is Francis Bacon depressing to look at, or exhilarating to look at? Bacon said it was the duty of art to throw you back into life with more passion and violence. To feel life more violently, to feel it more intensely.”

Ridley draws no boundaries between his art forms – “It all comes down to storytelling, really” – but here he has a special belief in the theatre, in its ritual and catharsis, its capacity to imagine disturbing worlds in the pursuit of a better one. “Plays can be used to make us feel,” he says. “I think that’s their chief function. The meaning is through the feeling . . . To me, that’s incredibly exhilarating.”

Vincent Riverruns at Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on Aug 3-7 and at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from Aug 10 for two weeks, before performances in Strabane, Armagh and Derry