Shivered – review

3 / 5 stars
Southwark Playhouse, London

Have you seen the one with the man on all fours, snorting like a pig, being given a Guinness enema? Or the child who loses half a hand to a chainsaw? The soldier being beheaded? Schoolboy Jack has seen all this and more on YouTube, and it has scoured him of empathy. Soldier Alec has seen death and destruction, too, first-hand: it has engendered in him a remorseless desire for truth in human relations, an abhorrence not of violence, but silent hypocrisy.

The first half of Philip Ridley's new play – his second at Southwark in less than a year – is exhilarating. Ridley has written what in more conventional hands would be a big, chewy, state-of-the-nation play, examining the effects of deindustrialisation and the internet on the family and the self, then shattered it, disordering its chronology, heightening its complexity. Every shard of the first act slices deeper into complacent ethics: should Jack's inability to read be blamed on Google, or on his mother's self-absorption? How different are the films he watches from the fairground freakshows of old? Alec's mother, Lyn, eulogises responsibility and duty – so why doesn't she support her son's decision to go to war?

Ridley's excoriating politics come sprinkled with fairy dust, glittering in fairground worker Gordy's vivid flights of fancy, and the delicately handled relationship between Jack and Alec's brother, Ryan. But as he moves into the second act, the connections Ridley makes between his characters become more schematic, less satisfying. Scenes that have previously been described are played out, with no apparent difference between action and memory, no sense of illumination. But if the energy of the story dissipates, the performances, particularly from Joseph Drake and Josh Williams as Ryan and Jack, remain fiercely committed.