The Fastest Clock in the Universe

Set in a flat above a disused fur factory in a gothic East End, Ridley’s antihero, Cougar Glass, is every bit the grotesque and spotlessly narcissistic fiend that Bret Easton Ellis’ Patrick Bateman is in American Psycho, written a year before this play. And Glass may leave audiences feeling similarly uneasy about ideas of consumerism and self-gratification. Particularly so in director Tom O’Brien’s more than capable hands as he guides Joshua Blake’s massively threatening performance.

Blake arrives on stage stripped down to tighty whities and sits down, all perma-tanned and exfoliated like an effigy to ‘modern man’. In this room, full of stuffed birds, he is waited on hand and foot by the equally talented Ian Houghton as Captain, a tragic figure whose balding head tells us Cougar’s Wilde-like fantasy of immortality is as specious as it is deluded.

Together, they concoct a fake birthday party, during which Cougar expects to lure an unwitting schoolboy in the nastiest of ways.

As with Ellis, the writing is very funny, and the characters are drawn with comparable zest, despite the tendency for glibness among the supporting actors. This should be rectified because this is nasty: a dark play that is as disturbing as those stuffed birds on the walls.