This is a guest post by Michael Riordan
Philip Ridley’s Moonfleece is not a play about the BNP. It was not intended as a response to the recent rise of the far-right. To suggest, as news reports have done, that the play was written to raise awareness of racism and homophobia among the white working class is to reduce to a caricature a portrayal of the process of mythmaking, which eschews political dogmatism in equal measure as its leading characters embrace it.
The play is part of a series of five one-act dramas, written by Philip Ridley, which explore the cathartic power of story-telling. It is set in the living room of a derelict council flat in East London, currently home to Link, a British man from an unspecified ethnic minority. His peace is disrupted by the entrance of a group of young white men, including the brutish and gaffe-prone Gavin, campaigning for the local far-right candidate, Avalon. After setting up what seems to be a simple contrast (“You’re an illegal immigrant, ain’t you?” “No.” “What’s your bloody name them?” “Ain’t telling you!” “Illegal! I can smell it on him”), the play complicates matters by drawing our emotional responses towards the character of Curtis, who is Avalon’s stepson, and not your regular BNP member. He is, according to his friends, “a bit of a thinker”. Indeed, the play is a passage of discovery for the emotional Curtis: we find he and his friends are not here for political reasons, but in order to learn about the death of Curtis’s beloved brother Jason with the help of a disabled medium and the myths which are the mainstay of Ridley’s work.
The central lesson of the play is that the personal trumps the political. In conversation, Ridley explains that most people in the East London he grew up turned to the far right for deeply personal reasons, “to find a reason why things turn out as they do”. This explains the centrality of the myths to all the characters. So not only do we have Gavin’s tale of a “great nation” led by the Arthurian Avalon, which excludes “immigrants, cripples and perverts”, but the final resolve is provided by Zak’s narration of his encounter with Jason. It is that myth, which provides the title of the play, which forces Curtis and his friends to rethink their political allegiances. Yet, ironically for those who wish to see the play as an attack on the BNP, it is the characters who have not bought fully into the mythology who remain unaffected by the deeply personal revelations which stories provide — on stage, Emily Plumtree as Sarah leaves Sean Wesley’s Curtis looking alone and empty as the play draws to a close.
The headteacher and the governors of Dorston School, where the play was due to be shown on 1 April, did not see through the political imagery in the first scene when they pulled the play at the last moment on the grounds that it “include[d] characters and themes of a political and potentially discriminatory nature”. Influenced no doubt, by reports that this was Ridley’s “most directly political play to date”, and fearful of protests by the English Defence League scheduled — coincidentally — for the same day as the performance, the governors acted to reassure the City Council that the play would not add to their woes. Yet in doing so, they denied the people of Dudley a subtle and complex portrayal of life in deprived areas of England, which avoids the narrow stereotypes of the “liberal establishment”, who bear the brunt of the far right’s criticisms of the play and, one must add, the play itself.
