Karagula at Styx, N17
reviewed for The Times, 17th June 2016
Lynette Clarke and Obi Abili are part of a compelling cast in Max Barton’s production, set in a bar
Teenage proms, alas, seem to have made the firm leap from the US to the UK. Let’s hope they don’t translate quite as painfully as those of Mareka, the nightmarishly perfect suburbia at the heart of Philip Ridley’s new play.
Behind white picket fences, a theocracy enforces rituals based on one fragment of revelation: broken images of two beautiful young people, in a land of apple pie and milkshakes, who set off in a limousine before mysterious shots are issued from a grassy knoll.
So when young Dean MacKenzie (Theo Solomon) senses that he’s about to be voted prom king, he knows his number’s up. This is a society committed to the human sacrifice of its most promising young people.
You will find all this being played out near Tottenham Hale, in an abandoned ambulance depot turned hipster bar. Ridley made his name with this stuff, though back then there was more torture porn and less alien gobbledegook. There’s still a bit of gore towards the end, but instead of confronting us with the strain and sinews of corporeality, the play is swaddled in layers of impenetrable sci-fi vocabulary.
It’s the talent of the next generation that makes Karagula exciting. Ensemble scenes are taut, tense and terrifying. Lanre Malaolu, as Mareka’s preppy crown prince, offers a masterclass in menacing charisma; Obi Abili impresses, too, in a testing range of roles.
For the first half, Max Barton directs in a long, narrow catwalk of a space as stories of Mareka jostle with snippets from other, equally dystopian civilisations, testing and daring us to find the narrative link.
The second act goes downhill, and not just due to the unnecessary audience trek to a separate entrance and a new, uncomfortable, end-on seating arrangement. (It’s particularly unnecessary given that Barton uses the constraints of the previous set-up so ingeniously.)
It’s now Ridley’s job to make sense of his separate sci-fi story strands, leading occasionally to a sense that we’re watching a cheap theatrical remake of Dune. Yet the cast, including the signing actor Caroline Parker, remain compelling and you will never look at milkshakes the same way.
