Vincent River

REVIEW:Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Vincent River, whose gruesome murder brings two characters together in Philip Ridley’s intense drama, was always writing stories. “Helped him make sense of things,” his mother Anita tells Davey, the 17-year-old who discovered his body and tracks her down to an impossibly grubby East London flat. Here though, as Sophie Motley’s production for Prime Cut astutely recognises, it is these two tough and damaged souls who need a story – a narrative to explain the mystery of a homophobic hate crime, a structure to contain their grief.

Ridley, whose theatrical work is better known for its menacing licks of the absurd, went a different route with Vincent River. First staged in 2000, the play occurs in real time, in one room, where dialogue comes with mumbles and evasions, its speakers compelled by an artful naturalism. A family teacup, for instance, triggers a memory from the magnificent Eleanor Methven’s Anita, delicately unravelling a history of family shame and single motherhood. You may see Davey’s secrets coming a mile off, but their details are no less realised.

It would be unwise to treat Ridley’s pay as kitchen sink realism, though: this story is still a story. Kerr Logan’s guarded Davey may provide the details of a homophobic attack, while Philip Stewart’s similarly elaborate sound design lets London bleed through the window, but Motley conspires with her designer Stuart Marshall to construct a flat as septic and unfinished as a troubling memory, where music cues and Sarah Jane Shiel’s lighting effects frequently distend reality.

Once an audience has assumed that a stripped wooden frame represents a solid wall, for instance, someone walks through it. Less bracing gaps appear in the fiction, though, where Logan’s rising inflections tend to derail his accent, which Methven’s steady command only amplifies. Such lapses are distracting when the production treads a careful line between realism and symbol. There is enough political and social context to cogently illustrate a culture of homophobia, enough subtle allusions to suggest a Christian allegory, and a grittier understanding of sexuality forced into shadows and toilet cubicles, where desire is twisted into dangerous situations. There is nothing more tragic in Vincent River than the simple line, “Too safe”. Ridley’s real risk, though, is to construct a substitute mother-son relationship between the yearning Anita and destructive Davey, while not shying away from the passion – whether angry or erotic – of grief.

In lesser hands it could look clumsy, but Methven and Logan perform deft psychological and physical shifts, initially circling each other in distrust, ceding to a touching intimacy and at one point frenzied contact. That is the play at its most startling, not because it stages a taboo or raises disturbing social issues, but because it dares to depict the rawness of grief and – more astoundingly – its catharsis.

The murder of Vincent River is still a senseless crime, but its story contains real meaning.

Runs until Aug 21st, then tours to Armagh, Strabane and Derry