In fairytales, communities ensure their continued safety by the yearly sacrifice of a local maiden to the town dragon. In this sprawling dystopian fantasy by Philip Ridley, the town of Mareka faces no obvious physical threat, but behind its apple pie and pink milkshake niceness lurks a macabre annual ritual: the teenagers voted the prom king and queen are put into an open limousine – just like JFK and Jackie in Dallas in 1963 – and shot and killed. Then a scapegoat is chosen as the assassin and gleefully lynched by the local populace.
Dean, certain to be made prom king but showing signs of dissidence by not being sufficiently enthusiastic about the latest flavour of milkshake, manages to escape his fate after a Salem-style witch-hunt trial by insect bite. On the other side of the desert, he is joined by his great love, Libby; both are escaping the suffocating conformity of Mareka. But is the human need to find meaning in life, and believe in something, stronger than the desire to be free?
Meanwhile, in this sprawling, three-hours-plus evening – which ignores the conventions of linear theatre and skips merrily between past, present and parallel universes, sometimes with confusing results – the Brave New World-style community of Cotna has found its own way of ensuring absolute devotion to the state. Personal relationships are banned; people have numbers, not names; and anyone who resists is executed by a blue light. But when twins, who can communicate without speaking, are found in the forest and brought into the city, it sows the seeds of Cotna’s destruction.
Ridley has seen the future and it doesn’t work, but it does look very much like a box set cross between Dr Who, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones (which it matches nasty death for nasty death) and Anne Washburn’s apocalyptic Mr Burns. In the latter, Burns suggested that the culture we hold dear may be valued simply as a result of haphazard misunderstandings and the fallibility of memory. In Karagula, Ridley posits that belief systems arise from similar mixups: misinterpretations of evidence and the fragmented nature of memory. Before you know it, people end up worshipping a snowglobe and instigating a holy war.
You’ve got to hand it to Ridley; he doesn’t lack imagination or ambition. But he does lack a strong dramaturg to shape the evening and trim the script’s many repetitions and more preposterous flourishes. Max Barton’s production – played in the traverse for the first half and then end-on after the interval – has undoubted verve, but doesn’t always bring clarity to proceedings, and it’s often clumsy. There’s an unevenness, too, in Shawn Soh’s more dash-than-cash designs. The talented cast of nine work like demons to keep this mad and often maddening evening afloat, finally sunk by its own excesses.
- At Styx, London, until 9 July. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
