Few plays livestreamed under lockdown replicate the immediacy of live theatre, but the ferocity of Joseph Potter’s performance in this one-man show by Philip Ridley makes you feel you’re in the room with him. Not that you’d particularly want to be. His character, Sasha, is a former child art prodigy who is now a clenched fist of barely suppressed aggression.
We first meet him necking handfuls of addictive painkillers as he and his boyfriend Chet, an actor and personal trainer, head from Ilford to Bethnal Green for his niece’s fifth birthday. Ridley – himself a former enfant terrible artist from the East End – flits between Sasha’s strained public face and his vicious internal monologue, in which he pours bile on his older brother Flynn and his young wife and daughters. Early on, it’s pretty clear we’re heading towards the revelation of some long ago trauma. And so it proves.
Potter is riveting as he ranges around the empty stage of Southwark Playhouse, all jumpy muscles, twitching nostrils and charismatic snarl. Director Wiebke Green’s camera cuts from medium to long shot but keeps him trapped in the frame of our attention. Once at the party, he verbally conjures up the family and other guests: they are broadly caricatured, simpering idiots, but that’s the way Sasha sees them.
The character just about holds it together in company, but when left alone he’s prone to petty acts of vandalism and sabotage, hence the title. Repeated mentions of his mother bode ill. Then a garrulous fellow guest starts quizzing him about his brilliant childhood career and things go quickly awry.
If it weren’t for the verve and conviction Potter brings to it, the emotional clout of the piece would not be entirely earned. There’s always a whiff of the audition-room showstopper to highly-charged monologues like this: the sense of a writer giving a performer the chance to display the full panoply of feeling before a dramatic meltdown.
It appears Sasha has been acting out this arc of behaviour again and again over the years: so it’s not clear why his family continue going through the motions with him, or why Chet has stuck around. And who is called ‘Chet’ these days, anyway?
All that said, this remains a stirring piece of work, that reminds you what it’s like to be in the presence of an actor firing on all cylinders.
From tonight (Mon 25) to 28 Jan: southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
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