A Ferocious Play About Love, From a Director Who Embraces the Surreal
Rory McGregor takes on Philip Ridley’s “Tender Napalm”—and Theaterlab’s infamous pole
“I could squeeze a bullet between those lips,” Man declares. “It would feel as natural as a pearl in the palm of an oyster.”
“I could get a spoon and prise it in your eye sockets,” Woman counters. “When your eyes eventually pop out, they would land in the spoon with a gentle...splosh.”
Tender Napalm is a play about love. Acclaimed English playwright Philip Ridley’s 2011 work, now running at Theaterlab through December 16, is a ferocious two-hander examining two lovers’ desperate attempts to stay afloat following a devastating loss. To survive, Man and Woman share in wild fantasies—most of them violent, sensual, childlike, or all of the above.
The buzzy director Rory McGregor, born in London and now based in New York, follows up Josh Azouz’s horror comedy Buggy Baby and Christina Masciotti’s No Good Things Dwell in the Flesh with his barebones revival of Ridley’s scorching work, led by Ben Ahlers (The Gilded Age) and Victoria Pedretti (An Enemy of the People). I spoke with McGregor about discovering Ridley’s work, the heart of Tender Napalm and “activating the pole.”
How did you first discover Philip Ridley’s work?
I wanted to be a film director originally—as a teenager I was into Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Kubrick. But then a friend of mine gave me The Pitchfork Disney, which Philip Ridley wrote in 1991. I’d never read anything like it. It really blew the hinges off my brain, and blew up my understanding of what was possible in theater. I became very interested in the live event and how you can craft such a specific world on stage.
Ridley’s plays tend to be visceral, sometimes sexually explicit, often very abstract. The sexual imagery of Tender Napalm feels shocking even now.
When Ridley’s play Mercury Fur was first put on in London, he got a one-star review that said, “This is the most shocking thing I’ve seen since [Sarah Kane’s] Blasted.” And the show immediately sold out.
Yet at the same time, Napalm is also a very tender piece. What’s at the heart of the play for you?
When Ridley was describing the play to me, he said that he’d wanted to “find a new vocabulary to describe love.”
In our culture, we think of love as this positive thing. But when you consider our descriptions of love, the words can be quite violent: “You’re breaking my heart,” “You’re crushing me,” “I’m falling for you.” It’s all this imagery of people collapsing.
I’d always found it to be such a specific articulation of what love is. The gentleness of it, but also the spikier, thornier parts of love, and how it’s all wrapped up in grief.
The pair’s more violent stories are intertwined with games that are quite childlike— fantasies of defeating serpents, or leading armies of monkeys. That almost threw me off more than the violent or sexual imagery, these moments where they just seemed like a couple of scared kids.
Man and Woman have lost a child. They’ve lost their daughter. So maybe they are recreating worlds they built for their daughter. Or maybe these are stories they loved telling their daughter, and now to survive together, they have to keep telling them. Everyone takes something different away from it, which is what I love about the play.
Ridley’s language is so precise, and he never guides the audience by the hand. You have to pitch that language so carefully to draw an audience into his world. What guided your barebones staging at Theaterlab?
I saw my job as sculpting and enhancement. I didn’t want to have any big, fuckin’ flashy gestures showing off how interesting a director I am. Everything, for me, comes out of the text. So most of what I was doing was building a vocabulary for the actors. Not only a physical vocabulary, but also a vocabulary of how to pitch the play—when it’s self-referential and they’re aware of the game, and when they are deeper in it.
I also wanted to use sound very delicately. There is this recurring rumbling sound, which Woman refers to as “the bombs,” that we created by distorting the sound of a car. When Man talks about the UFO, the sound of the spaceship is the distorted hum of a refrigerator.
Those noises are the real world pulsing in. But they’re playing the games because they don’t want to let that in, they don’t want to deal with the grief of losing their daughter. There’s no one that’s gone through what they’ve gone through in that moment, and as destructive as their relationship is, they can’t break free of it. Man has that line where he says: “I’d rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another.”
At one point Man starts speaking to an imagined child, possibly their daughter, and Woman says “Don’t.” Is he, at times, trying to pull her back into reality? And is she sometimes doing the same for him?
He wants her to talk about their child, and she wants him to talk about the night that they met. And she won’t talk about the child immediately, because the grief is too much. And for him, that night when they met is so beautiful, but it’s also so tied to his father dying.
So they play these games to try to activate that in the other person. There are times when they both find a memory too much, too painful, so they both jump back. There are other times where one person goes back quicker than the other. It’s a constant push-and-pull.
One of the trickiest elements of the Theaterlab space is that pole right in the middle of the room. I’ve never seen a show “activate the pole” more successfully than Tender Napalm. It becomes so many different things in all their different games.
Joey, that means the world to me, seriously. Orietta [Crispino, artistic director of Theaterlab] said to me from the beginning: “Embrace the pole.” In the rehearsal room, we would have a bench turned on on its side that would represent the pole in the middle of the room. And I would find myself, on breaks, just looking at it. Thinking very deeply about the pole. [laughs]
I knew that I wanted it to be the serpent. It’s again, just, finding a very specific but simple vocabulary, and the pole actually ended up being another great thing to use in that.
So you were born in East London, and got your undergraduate degree in history at the University of York. How did you end up based in New York?
I was studying history at York but ended up directing like 30 plays for the drama society. I knew that there was something happening, so I started to read a lot of theater theory, and I discovered Anne Bogart’s books. First A Director Prepares; then I read And Then You Act, and I was just blown away by it. Anne looks at theatre in this more philosophical, metaphorical way, and I wasn’t finding that in the U.K.. I was just like, “I have to meet this woman.” And I saw that she ran the graduate directing concentration at Columbia, so I applied.
Anne does this mad audition process where she invites like 25 people, and you direct something in 48 hours. It’s like the directing Olympics. I was 21, and got on the waitlist. She told me I was too young and to go get some experience. So I ended up taking three separate shows to the Edinburgh Fringe that year. Then when someone dropped out and I got in, my dad basically said to me, “Go out there and see if you can figure it out. If you can’t, it’s a good story!” I went, I made it work, and ten years later I’m still here.
Why stay in New York? I feel like there’s a slightly clearer path for rising directors in the London theater scene. Not that it’s easy anywhere.
The bridge from fringe theater to an off-West End theater is smaller than the equivalent [path] here. But the odd thing is, I now have great connections in the British theater scene because of being over here. I became, like, “Our Man In New York.” The first British show I did was Sea Wall/A Life as associate director to Carrie Cracknell. Then I worked with Rupert Goold on Ink. And I went from associate to Sam Mendes on Lehman Trilogy to now being the West End Director on the current run in London.
So I did end up working with a lot of Brits. And then at the same time I’ve been trying to find an audience for the plays that I’m interested in and that I don’t see that often in New York.
At a glance, your career includes a lot of British work, including your staging of Josh Azouz’s horror comedy Buggy Baby last year. But you also recently did Christina Masciotti’s No Good Things Dwell in the Flesh, which was set in Queens. Really, it’s hard to find any simple throughline in the plays you pick.
It tends to be stuff that has a surreal edge, or that looks at the world through a non-naturalistic lens. For me, it’s always about the live event. If I can find something I want to do with a text that can only be experienced in that room that you’re in that moment, that’s it.
