REVIEW: Tender Napalm, Southwark Playhouse ★★★★★

Tender Napalm at Southwark Playhouse is an exquisite Ridlean treat, writes JBR.

Lara Rossi & Tom Byam-Shaw. Photo: Camilla Greenwell. Space. Distance. Time.  The mythology of love.  The juxtaposition of the lyrical and the vernacular.  The most exquisite exposition of spoken word and two of the most committed, dangerous performances seen in theatre this year.  Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm has returned to Southwark Playhouse at the end of a UK tour and it is as gut-wrenchingly beautiful and heart-stoppingly shocking as ever. Ridley weaves a taut tale – deftly pinpointing intimacy  so that it is difficult not to experience an uncomfortable sense of intrusion on private moments.  Tender Napalm deals with what is said, and what is left unsaid, and Ridley pinpoints with unnerving accuracy the cadences and rhythms of lovers talking, and, with devastating incisiveness, the silences that fall.  As a writer, Ridley can tease a line out into a gorgeous, humourous, melancholic exploration like no other.  He is simultaneously lyrically verbose and  unnervingly concise; each word sears the air, branding the atmosphere with his particular linguistic mastery. Lara Rossi and Tom Byam-Shaw perform Olympic feats of physical and verbal dexterity with extraordinary and intense focus.  The play undulates like an operatic score, aria follows aria, refrains return again and again, here pianissimo, there con somma passione. At such bravura displays, the audience can barely hold back their applause.  And, like virtuosi, Rossi and Byam-Shaw know when to race ahead and when to hold back.  Thus, after all the vocal and verbal fireworks comes a peace that is heartbreaking in its stillness and honesty.

William Reynolds’ design places the actors in traverse, a sparse white space accentuating the distance between them and providing an arena for their performances.  Words zing back and forth at breakneck speed.  Beneath stark halogen strip lights they explore the mythology of love, the stories we tell each other to make it alright, to take the pain away, to avoid the subject we must never, never talk about.  Time and space are the ever present extra characters, jolting us backwards and forwards between the present and a memory, between the real and the fantasy.

David Mercatali’s faultless direction and Tom Godwin’s movement work are the masterstrokes here.  In a piece so reliant on the beauty of the spoken word, and whose oxymoronic themes are so structured to enhance effect, Mercatali’s physical, energised direction at once distracts the audience from the language and heightens its effect.  Mercatali has understood the delicate balance of opposites that is inherent in much of Ridley’s work, his peculiar means of extrapolating time through language and the fracturing of the linear, and in Tender Napalm he has pushed simple theatricality to the limit.  His confident, assertive direction has a life force of its own, pulsating through the rhythms of Ridely’s altitudinous imagination with startling energy and feral promiscuity. The drive and grandeur of Mercatli’s work is superlatively enhanced by Godwin’s bold, courageous movement work. Tender Naplam is a Ridlean treat; haunting, terrifying and uplifting.  You will most likely not hear a more exquisite play, nor see two more compelling performances this year. ***** (5 stars) Runs until 23rd June More info