Tender Napalm at Southwark Playhouse

Tender Napalm at Southwark Playhouse

26 April, 2011
by: Naima Khan

Naima Khan reviews the brutally romantic Tender Napalm at Southwark Playhouse.

The unrelenting sound of a beating pulse, like a ticking time bomb, welcomes the audience into Philip Ridley’s striking new play, Tender Napalm, at Southwark Playhouse. With the audience sitting on either side of the action, we watch a man and a woman size each other up before taking their starting positions at either end of the stage. A fierce tennis match of words unfolds and a brutal kind of romance is fired from each side. Our heads turn like pendulums to catch what’s being served and the reactions it provokes.

Ridley has given his nameless characters an overwhelming love for each other and a fascination with each other’s physicality, as well as something much more moving. They have a history, a romantic story and a shared grief, but they’re not here to tell us about it. They talk to one another and in a pattern that they understand. There’s a slight classic feel to it with plenty of storytelling and monologues. But it’s also steeped in metaphor, and flicks between the real and the imagined. It takes me a while to get used to it. In this sense, Tender Napalm makes a few demands on the audience, but they are basic ones. We have to keep up in the beginning while we get used to this format and mode of expression. But Ridley’s script is consistent and I feel like my brain has learnt a new way to receive the themes. It’s then that I begin to appreciate their familiarity.

This is the story of young people falling in love, possibly for the first time, staying together and surviving calamity. I leave the theatre and I want to see a dozen variations on this. I want to see it with an elderly couple, a gay couple, with an older woman and a younger man but with this same visceral sparring and underlying affection.

There’s talk of tsunamis and a recurring motif about looking at the view, taking stock of the devastation. Things descend into a playful battle of wits through flamboyant poetry, featuring armies of monkeys, serpents and tentacles. Strange as it sounds, it’s never that bizarre. In the hands of actors Jack Gordon and Vinette Robinson, these oddities become words that these characters would absolutely say. As they butt heads, they also admire one another and pepper the script with humour in their delivery.

Since Tender Napalm addresses relationships, everyone will take away something different from Ridley’s script and there are a few divisive aspects to it. I for one don’t see the point of the singing, which feels a little shoe-horned in and out of joint, but others will appreciate the change in tone. Tender Napalm is beautifully lyrical with incredibly imaginative storytelling at its core. By the end I’m satisfied: the loose ends have been tied up but I’m still thinking about that couple, their loss, their love and their unknowable future.

Tender Napalm runs at Southwark Playouse until 14th May. Click here to read Naima's interview with playwright Philip Ridley.

Images by Camilla Greenwell

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Naima Khan