A shock in the dark

Philip Ridley is 36 years old, but he feels exactly the same now as he did when he was 10. He happily admits that he is in a state of arrested development. His unique selling point is that he's made an art out of that fact. His plays, and most of his films, deal in the most alarming fashion with disturbed and sexualised children. His latest, which opens at Hampstead Theatre tomorrow, confronts the death of a beautiful teenage youth, Vincent River, found murdered in a public lavatory in the East End.

What emerges from this tense encounter between the dead youth's mother and a 17-year-old male witness, is a chilling account of homophobic hate.

The writer, who shot to fame 10 years ago with his film script of The Krays, starring Martin and Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, has always been fascinated by confusions and fears about teenage sexuality. "We don't know what childhood is any more," argues Ridley, dressed, as ever, from head to foot in black. "That's always obsessed me. The result is widespread moral panic. There are TV documentaries about 14-year-olds having children, and the next day the same 14-year-olds are classed as victims. We're so confused about childhood, and about our sexuality, that we've lost the touchstones of what these things are."

One senses that Ridley's own touchstones are very much in place. It's the adult assumptions about sexuality that make the covert gay world of the young Vincent River such a murky, fearful place. "Jean Cocteau said the two most threatening things in life are whores and children," says Ridley. "I agree with him totally, and even more threatening is a child whore.

"My own view of childhood has never been that it's a place of innocence but a place of quiet malevolence," he contends. "I saw some pretty violent and dark things in the East End in the 1960s and 1970s. Fights, bullying, and being endlessly bullied myself. When The Reflecting Skin [Ridley's first feature film] came out in America, the big criticism was that the children in my film weren't acting as children. In fact, quite the opposite is true. What they were not acting as was Macaulay Culkin. My young people torture animals and make necklaces out of beetles. They do heartless and amoral things. And some critics don't think that's right because they've never seen it in other films. They see me as amoral ... dangerous." Many might argue that those critics have a point. The gloriously vain Cougar Glass in The Fastest Clock in the Universe celebrates yet another of his many 19th birthdays by punching a pregnant girl in the stomach. And a gang of platinum-hard teenage girls, wearing gold-painted Doc Martens, viciously turn on an old gangster in Ghost from a Perfect Place. Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington "left the theatre feeling corrupted and degraded" after watching a cigarette being stubbed out on John Wood's neck. Ridley tells me he's never used violence as a thrill, and that the shocks in his plays prepare the audience for the perception of magic.

The idea that he's some sort of immoral purveyor of sex and violence exasperates him. His plays, he argues, are storytelling rituals, and exorcisms of his own fears, which include sex, age, death, and decay. "My work has always been seen as dark," he says. "But I don't see it as dark at all. I see it as dramatically truthful. In terms of the stage plays, the artistic exhilaration is that they dare go to those places other plays fear to reach. That can't be dark. The alchemy of that exhilaration interests me. It's like a rush that involves the entire audience. How far can you go? The thrill is reaching that trance-like state, that moment of vertigo.

"You sometimes forget how shocking that can be," admits Ridley, pointing out a scene in The Passion of Darkly Noon (his second feature film) where the hero covers himself in razor-sharp barbed wire. "I got so obsessed in the editing suite with how beautiful the red looked against Brendan Fraser's pale skin - this is so St Sebastian - that I didn't notice how shocking the scene was. The first public screening was filled with screams."

Vincent River marks a sea change of sorts from the gaudy fantasies of his X-rated plays. The horror here comes out of something real. The heightened baroque quality, so playfully apparent in his other work, is toned down.

"This is a domestic scenario," concedes Ridley. "All the places mentioned exist, and out of it comes all this savagery. It becomes disturbing for other reasons."

Doesn't it frighten you where your plays go? "No. I'd be much more shocked if a kitten came out of a boot. They seem perfectly real to me. It's just what I do."

Vincent River is at Hampstead Theatre from tomorrow to 7 October. Box office: 020 7722 9301.