Tender Napalm

(Paperback)

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Description

I could squeeze a bullet between those lips. Point first. Press it between those rosebud lips. Prise it between your pearly whites. Gently. I wouldn't break a single tooth. Philip Ridley's first new play since 2008 marks a change of direction for the acclaimed, ever restless and maverick writer. Tender Napalm is a high-impact, high-concept two handed play which explores the landscape that is a relationship between a man and a woman. Explosive, poetic, brutal and ultimately redemptive, the play weaves a compelling theatrical tapestry to re-examine and re-define the language of love. This abstract play is cool, slick and savagely romantic. There are no defined settings, narratives or characters. Instead, Tender Napalm is 70 minutes of real time drama: simply a man and woman dissecting their relationship through a mixture of memory, fantasy, and a mixture of the two. And, by doing this, they touch upon zeitgeist concerns of violence, war and faith. Tender Napalm is a showcase of the imaginative, fantastical and magical poeticisms Ridley can achieve from the bleak and brutal themes of war and destruction. This volume also contains five poems from the performance sequence Lovesongs for Extinct Creatures: Your Love, Dark Sky Craving, The Silver Hat, I'm Waiting to be Killed and The Seams, publishing for the first time extracts from Philip Ridley's cycle of love poetry.

Reviews

fierce, transfixing and ultimately very moving... Mr. Ridley, who is also a filmmaker and a children's book author, is high on my list of contemporary playwrights these days. He was always a writer of daring and satanic imagination, with a sui generis vocabulary to match...The exotic worlds he conjures feel deeply familiar, even to the point of banality, which is what makes them all the scarier and all the more revelatory. -- Ben Brantley * New York Times *
Philip Ridley's extraordinary play...brilliantly juxtaposes the banal and the fantastical, the delicate and the brutal, the euphoric and the agonised, as it maps out the voyage from first attraction to consuming devotion, by way of devestating tragedy . . . It is rich, slippery, grotesque and lovely, crammed with the writer's distinctive bruising lyricism and uncompromising immediacy . . . It is heady, heart-stopping stuff; wildly intoxicating. * Sam Marlowe, The Times, 27.4.11 *
In the way it digs the loam of memory and explores how lovers create their own stories and mythologies, Ridley's play is completely and dizzyingly of itself. The writing seethes and burns...Seldom has sexual love been explored on stage with such ferocious honesty, brutality and melting tenderness. * Lyn Gardner, Guardian, 28.4.11 *

Author Bio

Playwright Philip Ridley was born in the East End of London, where he still lives and works. He is a contemporary artist, poet, novelist, film-maker and one of the country's most celebrated living playwrights. Ridley has been described as 'probably a genius' (Time Out), 'a visionary' (Rolling Stone), 'the master of modern myth' (Guardian) and 'the best British playwright of the last 20 years' (Aleks Sierz, author of In-Yer-Face Theatre).