How do you defend yourself against brutal school bullies? Through narrative magic and imaginative power, according to Philip Ridley's play aimed at nine-year-olds and upwards. I wish I believed it were true. But even if Ridley supplies easy solutions to real problems, his play has the charm of fairytale fantasy.
Ridley's setting is the roof of an East End tower block where the solitary Jake goes to scribble. On this occasion he is pursued by three schoolgirls, two of whom regard him as a nerdish geek, and by his playground tormentor, muscle-boy Russell and his jeering acolytes. Dangled over the roof top edge, Jake is saved by the promise of a piece of storytelling: what follows is a fanciful fable of princesses and dragons that gradually involves the whole group and gathers its own improvised, theatrical momentum.
Ridley's piece owes something to Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, which also dealt with the redemptive power of play-making. But where that showed imagination flowering in a realistically drawn convict-world, Ridley's East End kids, who neither dope, drink nor curse, strike me as too good to be true.
The best way to take the play is as a portrait not of the world as it is but as Ridley would like it to be: a play where the myth maker is king and where bully-boys can be transformed by the exercise of their undernourished imagination.
On that idealised level, both Ridley's play and Terry Johnson's production work well. The rooftop becomes a metaphorical theatre in which supermarket trolleys turn into golden chariots, the hirsute, heavy-metal brother of one of the girls becomes a feigned monster and the story acquires its own self-propelling quality.
Nitzan Sharron as the jerkish Jake, Jody Watson as his closet groupie and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the bullying narcissist also convince you of their teenage credentials. In our post Lord of the Flies age, it's a bit hard to believe in the triumph of adolescent virtue. But Ridley is offering an improving play about the power of fiction which clearly speaks over the heads of adult sceptics to a highly attentive young audience.
