Piranha Heights review, Old Red Lion Theatre

The warning on the flyers for Piranha Heights reads: contains violence, sexual references, full-frontal nudity and blasphemous language throughout. Now you've been warned, let me add that it's  thrilling, it's chilling, and the language is excoriating, but even in the midst of the most extraordinary violence there's laugh-out-loud humour. Welcome to the world of Philip Ridley, where young thugs with the same mad intensity as the droogs in A Clockwork Orange communicate in Mork and Mindy speak while tearing up a pair of brothers straight out of Only Fools and Horses.

Piranha Heights starts with a showdown between cab driver, Alan, and his brother Terry who disappeared just before their mother died. They both want the lease on her flat. The fighting gets dirty. Alan is forced to hear that their mother was a prostitute. A covered girl, Lilly, enters speaking gibberish from Middle Of the Road's pop hits. To Alan's horror, Terry invites her, her baby, and her psychophathic partner, Medic, to move in. As Medic, a nutter in striped socks who morphs from playful to murderous in the space of a sentence, Ryan Gerald is utterly compelling, leading us into an astonishing series of physical turns that are inventive, anarchic, exciting, and for something so mad and vile in every particular, gloriously uplifting.

Ridley's work is so cleverly crafted, it appears to develop organically, challenging senses both on and off stage. Essentially it's a lament for, and an affirmation of, the human need for love and order - a need so deep that even the most neglected and the most dysfunctional will seek to find it or create it through whichever cracked prism they view the world. When in the second half Alan's teenage son, Garth, another striped-sock maniac-in-the-making, arrives with his invisible best friend - a cricket - to find his uncle being strangled, we have a whole new scenario with which to contend. There is a point where the boys talk of blowing people up: it is not the people who die that matter, they say, but the response of those who'll see the images. Piranha Heights (presumably the name of the housing block in which events unfold) is not a play for those with overactive imaginations or weak stomachs.

In conclusion: Under Max Barton's complex and razor sharp direction, on a fabulous set by Cecile Tremolieres that uses every inch of the tiny space at the Old Red Lion Theatre, the cast - Alex Lowe, Phil Cheadle, Ryan Gerald, Jassa Ahluwalia, and Rebecca Boey - pull off a high energy, emotionally draining, tour-de-force. It's so worth a look if you can bear it.

References
Piranha Heights, Tickets
Picture by Oliver King, taken from Time Out