The story is simple enough: two brothers, Alan (Nicolas Tennant) and Terry (Matthew Wait), squabble over the ownership of their late mother’s flat. This straightforwardness of this domestic drama takes a sharp turn when Terry brings home Lilly (Jade Williams), a refugee from a war somewhere in the Middle East. This ‘intrusion’ could have been brilliantly unsettling – a sudden burst of the wider world through the walls of British middle-class ‘problems’ and sensibilities. It could have brought the two brothers into confrontation with wider issues and played off their reactions. Instead, Lilly’s long monologue on the litany of atrocities she has endured, including her own rape and the mutilation of her brother, has little impact. The play becomes a series of digressions, and the subject of violence remains unprocessed, unrelated, and without effect even for Lilly’s character (apart from the general inclination she shows towards pacifism).

This lack of coherence, this unwillingness to establish associative connections, is symptomatic of the rest of the play. Things happen, but we never know why. By the end of the evening, I had the distinct impression that nothing had changed in the character’s lives, neither in their attitudes nor opinions. This could have been an interesting topic of itself, but it remained undeveloped. Both the writing and the Lisa Goldman’s direction have to account for this indecisiveness.

The whole production was played at a fast pace. Behavioural an emotional changes occurred out of the blue. Particularly in the case of Medic (John Macmillan) who switched from idealistic lover to callous brute and back in the blink of an eye. This made it difficult to connect with the characters, to penetrate the different veneers they apply. Piranha Heights certainly is neither introspective nor empathetic. Everything happens on the harsh glittery surface. No reasons, no motivations are given. Clearly this is a purpose-led device, perhaps with the intention of depicting an alienated and alienating society, but the question remains: how far can you distance your audience before losing them completely?

Unfortunately, as the violence deteriorated, the play lost me, but not due to a lack of chances, quite the contrary! There are fragments of subtlety that hint at a greater depth to the piece: the roses and the weeds that the two brothers bring at the beginning of the play, and that end up in the same vase at the end; the rose petals as red stains on the floor, taking on various shapes in the audience’s imagination, from drops of blood to the severed lips of Lilly’s brother; and Luke Treadaways brilliant portrayal of Garth, Terry’s freakish son. Treadaway develops the physicality of the obsessive and repressed person in fine detail: the staring eyes, the claw-like hands, the body posture, the twitching face. It is a pity that this truly unsettling and strange character came so late in the course of the evening.

Aside from the overall construction of the plot, there was one other point of contention in Ridley’s writing. The playwright is overly enamoured with the use of discordant simile to provoke laughter. There’s only so many lofty comparisons to gratuitous violence that you can take before it descends into the superficial; missing the chance to create a truly gripping and menacing dialogue.