Leaves of Glass – Park Theatre, London

Writer: Philip Ridley

Director: Max Harrison

Philip Ridley’s narrative twists like a freshly hooked fish, slippery, desperate, and hard to pin down. And like a freshly hooked fish, the chances of a happy outcome are very small indeed.

First off, the easy stuff. This is an exquisitely mounted production. The deceptively simple set – four black-upholstered benches on a square playing-space that starts the play with a beautiful pearly lustre and finishes smirched and begrimed, and whether this is the intention of the designer Kit Hinchcliffe, or a happy accident, it nevertheless completely mirrors and amplifies the downwards progress of the characters.

The four actors, Kacey Ainsworth, Katie Buchholz, Ned Costello, and Joseph Potter, navigate the shifts and switches of Ridley’s text with compelling grace, presenting the unreliability of their characters with ease, snapping out the brisk dialogue so clearly that the nearly two hours of playing time flash by. All four find some unexpected but very welcome laughs, and drive home the corkscrewing plot lines to excellent effect. Particular credit goes to Ned Costello, tracing a character arc that starts as the personification of straightforward brotherly love, and gets steadily darker and less trustworthy as the story progresses. Max Harrison’s direction is clear and unfussy, the stagecraft on display is admirable, the lighting is very effective and the intimacy of the studio brings the audience closer to the heart of this masterpiece of gaslighting than it may want to be.

The tougher aspects of the show are all in the hands of Philip Ridley. He is a powerful writer with superb control of pace and character, and he tells horrible, horrible stories that lead the audience into dark and uncomfortable places. This show is about, if ‘about’ is a useful description, suicide and abuse and the manipulation of memory. The audience is taken through scenarios that are increasingly distressing, and kicked out of the theatre at the end of the show with no resolution, no comfort, no sense of the possibility of any happy outcome. Which raises the question, is making the audience comfortable any part of a show’s responsibility?

Unsettling, opening up topics audiences prefer to shy away from, that’s a function of theatre too. Ridley does it supremely well. He writes plays that delight in keeping the audience unbalanced, and this play is a fine example of that, juggling truth in a succession of sharp, focussed scenes that leave us with fewer certainties than we started with. It doesn’t make for a comfortable evening’s entertainment, but it is arguably more important because of it. And this production gives a superb platform for all that squiggly doubt.

Runs until 3 June 2023