Last spring Company of Sirens presented Welsh premiers of Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm back to back with his extra ordinary Mercury Fur. We developed a rapport with Philip and wanted to explore his visceral yet poetic vision further.
Supporting Wall had premiered Dark Vanilla Jungle to great acclaim at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival followed by a UK tour. We asked to stage a new production here in Wales using young Welsh talent in performance and production roles.
All involved (myself excluded!) are recent graduates of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Philip Ridley’s work has a real resonance among young people and Dark Vanilla Jungle is no exception.
Seren Vickers plays Andrea a young girl who has been abandoned by her family, groomed and abused by sexual preditors and rendered homeless. Depressing? In part , but Ridley allows her spirit and extra ordinary sense of hope and possibility to shine through in sections of Bleak Humour that are breathtakingly brilliant.
Dark Vanilla Jungle is theatre with the additives taken out. You see a young girl in a space who tells you her story. Presentation is minimal but effective enabling the play to speak clearly and simply.
Philip Ridley is never a writer to miss. My first experience of his work at the Bush was a thrilling, bracing shock. The play was called The Pitchfork Disney. The play unfolds in a single room of a house where a brother and sister, Haley and Presley, play infantile games, terrorise each other about the outside world, binge on chocolate and medicines. Into this room comes Cosmo Disney, a menacing and beautiful young man in a glittering red jacket. He flirts and threatens, toys with their memories; at one moment, he eats a cockroach. At the end of the play he brings in his associate, Pitchfork Cavalier, a bear of a man in a similar red glittery jacket and a gimp mask, who stands on a chair and sings voicelessly. They leave. Within seconds I was hooked. And have been since.
Chris Durnall, Director
Welsh premier of Dark Vanilla Jungle
Tuesday, March 3 until Saturday , March 7 at 7.30 with a Saturday matinee at 2.30.
Tickets are £10/8 concessions
Chapter Arts Centre Canton Cardiff
www.chapter.org 02920304400
Company of Sirens 07834600941
companyofsirens.com
Company of Sirens
Designed by Bethany Seddon
Lighting by Ben Stimpson
Sound by William Basinski
Company Stage Manager Steffi Pickering