Tender Napalm

by Philip Ridley

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408156384
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/08/2014
Series:	Modern Plays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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).
Philip Ridley was born and grew up in the East End of London. He studied painting at St Martin's School of Art. He has written many highly regarded and hugely influential stage plays: the seminal The Pitchfork Disney (now published as a Methuen Modern Classic), The Fastest Clock in the Universe (winner of a Time Out Award, the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, and the Meyer-Whitworth Prize), Ghost from a Perfect Place, Vincent River (nominated for the London Festival Fringe Best Play Award), the highly controversial Mercury Fur, Leaves of Glass, Piranha Heights (nominated for the WhatsOnStage Mobius Award for Best Off West End Production), Tender Napalm (nominated for the London Fringe Best Play Award), Shivered (nominated for the OffWestEnd Best New Play Award), Dark Vanilla Jungle (winner of an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award), Radiant Vermin (now published as a Methuen Modern Classic), Tonight With Donny Stixx, Karagula (nominated for the OffWestEnd Best New Play Award), The Beast of Blue Yonder, The Poltergeist (winner of the OffWestEnd OnComm Award for Best Live Streamed Play) and Tarantula; plus several plays for young people (collectively known as The Storyteller Sequence): Karamazoo, Fairytaleheart, Moonfleece (named as one of the 50 Best Works About Cultural Diversity by the National Centre for Children's Books), the seminal Sparkleshark (the first of the Connections Festival plays – all written for young people – to be staged professionally by the National Theatre), and Brokenville; also, Feathers in the Snow (shortlisted for the Brian Way Best Play Award).

Editorial 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.
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

From the Publisher