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The Poltergeist review – you are invited to a new circle of hell

Philip Ridley’s interest in the dramatic monologue long precedes the pandemic, even if the form has since become the central, Covid-secure medium for playwrights. What is marked about this one-man play about family dysfunction and wasted genius is the absence of any signs of our current reality, and it feels all the more liberating for it.

It was the same with Ridley’s lockdown series, The Beast Will Rise, comprising 14 theatrical monologues on screen that grappled with typically dark and bristly subject matter, from animal cruelty and self-harm to worlds that had turned dystopian, though it did not mention our own.

The Poltergeist, which enlists the same director in Wiebke Green and contains a similarly ferocious intensity, was filmed on an empty stage at Southwark Playhouse last year (after an abortive run of just three live shows) and is streamed in partnership with Stream Theatre.

It locates itself in an unspecified contemporary timeframe that is untouched by the rules of social distancing and it features an extraordinary, multi-voiced performance from Joseph Potter. He plays Sasha, a former artist and child prodigy, now an anxious man who is disconnected from the fame of his artistic past, and grudgingly on his way to his brother’s garden party.

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We are sucked into Sasha’s buzzing world as Potter dramatises both his outer voice and his embittered inner state – he speaks with such venom that it seems as if he is grinding his words. “We have just been invited to a new circle of hell,” he says to himself when he gets the invitation to his niece’s birthday bash.

Alongside this doubleness, he incarnates every other accompanying character in the play, from Sasha’s mild-mannered boyfriend, Chet, to a retinue of family members – his brother and his smug wife, who brandishes a seemingly never-ending tray of lemon drizzle cupcakes at her guests, as well as the in-laws, children, and many grating guests.

The production is worth seeing for this polyphonic feat alone: Potter is privately fuming and darkly funny, speaking in maniacal, single-breathed sentences that spit out his fear, rage and, finally, a family injustice that has been buried but is unearthed at this children’s party.

Ridley’s use of language, too, is another pleasure, novelistic and painterly, summoning the imaginary streets of east London or a smart neighbourhood where “the pavement looks polished”, all against the pitch-black backdrop of the stage.

The script captures Sasha’s yearning for the art he has abandoned without ever saying so directly. He attended Central Saint Martins, we are told (as did Ridley), and even though he has left his painting days behind, he still sees the world around him in technicolour, describing it as if it were a painter’s palette.

There are moments when there is not quite enough distinction between the multiple voices, and the frenetic energy required by Potter in his sole enactment of this party of people comes to feel slightly laborious at times, even for the viewer, although it regains its tautness fairly quickly.

As a black comedy of manners, it comes fully alive and the satire on nuclear family life is amusing, too, with many zingy lines and snide asides: the children’s raucous birthday party looks to Sasha like “Hieronymus Bosch meets the Barbie dolls”. But there is a gothic note to the drama and we are kept guessing as to which tone the story will settle upon: is this a satire, a family psychodrama or a haunting? We are never quite sure and it does not seem to matter on the whole, but at times it seems like a slightly awkward welding of all three.

The resolution, when it comes, is not impactful enough, but the dramatic virtuosity of Potter’s performance, and the many sparks in Ridley’s prose, keep us afloat. The biggest accomplishment of this production, in the end, is its use of the monologue form, so overused in the past year but which appears freshly gripping here.