Ridley writes about what he knows, the East End where he was born and where he still lives, in the same block of flats where he spent his childhood.
What better description of love than feeling as if your blood "tingled and fizzed like it was full of sherbet"? At a school recently, one 12-year-old girl confessed to Ridley that that was exactly how she felt when her friend, Adam, took off his shirt for PE. In Vinegar Street there is a similar connection between words, pictures and feelings. The entire 10-minute speech consists of nothing but a series of strung-out images. His play, The Pitchfork Disney, includes what is almost certainly the longest monologue in contemporary drama. Like most of Ridley's work, it is the kind of book that kids love, and which makes parents feel slightly nervous.Īs befits someone who trained as a painter, Ridley writes using joined-up images. This is probably the first book to show on the page what a first kiss actually feels like. It is a short step from the ripe operatic visuals of Ridley's debut feature film The Reflecting Skin (1990), with its exploding frogs, to the exploding words of Vinegar Street. But then, Ridley always brings to his writing the same visual flair that he brings to his work as an artist, playwright and filmmaker.
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