Abstract
This chapter discusses six of Philip Ridley’s major plays: The Pitchfork Disney, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, Ghost from a Perfect Place, Mercury Fur, Leaves of Glass, and Piranha Heights. It shows that the grotesque in Ridley’s work serves to engage a variety of ethical, social, and political issues, and that the playwright’s use of extreme violence is fundamentally tied to these issues. Ridley’s grotesque rips apart the conventions both of the contemporary reality and the theatre in its assertive desire to engage the spectators in contemplating a potential reconstruction of the collapsed world. At the same time, the excessive nature of Ridley’s drama intimates the limits of using the grotesque in socially or politically committed art.
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Pilný, O. (2016). Engaging Monsters: Philip Ridley. In: The Grotesque in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51318-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51318-2_2
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