After watching the Actors Studio’s recent production of Philip Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe, directed by Joe Hasham (Fri 2 - Sun 11 Jun 2006, KLPac – Pentas 2), I decide to conduct a cursory search online for the playwright’s age, to no success. Numerous biographical paragraphs exist – and I now know that he was born in the East End, belonged to a theatre group at six, completed his first novel at seven and had his first solo exhibition age fourteen – but they all seem unwilling to divulge the digits. In photographs, Ridley is poised, sans eyebrows, goth-lite and prodigious, anywhere between 20 to 40.

Ridley’s protagonist in The Fastest Clock in the Universe is ageless in a similar sense: Cougar Glass (a newly-buff Gavin Yap) is 30, but he gets a seizure every time the fact is mentioned. A leather jacket, cool sunglasses, and a jet-black kiss-curl help, but to nourish waning self-denial Cougar defiantly re-enacts his 19th birthday every year with girl-on-girl porn, vodka, and a lone guest: one teenaged boy, lured, seduced and to be sexually consumed for life-giving vitae.

Dorian Gray, anyone? Both share a similar conceit: cheating age via the elevation of an act / object into totem. But while Oscar Wilde uses his to examine morality and aestheticism, Ridley’s effort, which premiered in 1992 to critical acclaim, is less circumspect, and sticks to a protagonist who is, very simply, afraid to grow old – and what we receive is a play that refuses to mature.

Characters are caricatures: bird-lover Captain Tock is Cougar’s co-habitator and co-conspirator – he helps his lover trap young boys because he has “no more youth to give.” Played by Ari Ratos, Tock is a stuttering doormat, owning a “junk shop” of antiques and hanging stuffed birds from the ceiling, sweeping up Cougar’s discarded cigarette ash. Not allowed a moment of rebellion (the closest he gets to it is to reminisce, passive-aggressively, about how he was once given the titular ‘Fastest Clock in the Universe’), Tock is an overgrown child begging for a hug from an unloving parent.

“Put your gloves on,” Cougar snaps in response to this request, and I almost empathise.

Tock is also marginally less annoying than tonight’s victim, sixteen-year-old Foxtrot Darling, who arrives complete with kiss-curl. “Just as Cougar likes it,” says Foxtrot, played by the teenage-looking Niki Cheong, flopping about with impossible naïveté, perfectly unsuspicious at the lack of teenage life in Cougar’s apartment. Through retrospective research I discover that Jude Law received his London stage debut playing Foxtrot – but no way could it have been a breakthrough role: the only thing mildly engaging about the character is that he brings a surprise guest.

Joanna Bessey, as Foxtrot’s unexpected fiancée Sherbet Gravel, delivers the ensemble’s best performance, taking control of the stage as soon as she appears, and throughout the second act. It helps that Sherbet is perhaps the play’s most developed character, all seventeen years of her, serving as less of a foil for Cougar as the reverse: “I wish to grow old gracefully,” she says, and “I can usually tell someone’s age just by looking at them,” giving meaningful looks at “someone with jet-black hair, badly dyed.”

There is a showdown, as expected: it occurs when Sherbet tries to announce Cougar’s middle-age status, causing him to pounce on her. The brawl is tense and convincing, the little knick-knacks of Tock’s antique avian sensibilities and Loo Jia-Wei’s set design fly, and the audiences slap their thighs with laughter. The night I am there they only acquiesce when blood is spilled.

They can be forgiven. Ridley script is difficult to dislike where wit and comedy is concerned; it’s not “agonisingly funny,” as advertised, but it’s competent, and the actors get their timing right.

Humour is everything that moves Faridah Merican’s character, the ironically-named Cheetah Bee, a doddering senior citizen in a fur coat whose deceased husband owned the former-fur factory, now-apartment complex where in the play is now set. She is a cardboard cut-out, a fairy-like figure that represents many of the play’s problems.

Cheetah Bee describes her husband’s method of skinning in gory detail – “The animal must be alive for the fur to be beautiful,” – and it helps evoke a semi-magical, gothic fairytale; but the tone smells more of vogue then artistic necessity, as does the almost-metaphorical naming scheme, and the barely-alive characters, who struggle to offer us a connection. Least of all crybaby Cougar, who declares:

“Fuck the milk of human kindness, welcome to the abattoir!”

By staying nineteen one stays angst-ridden, it seems.

Cheetah and Cougar come together early on, in the play’s heavy-handed Point (the fastest clock in the universe is love, darlings): Tock, who threatens to say Cougar’s age and sets him into a fit, fetches the old woman, who comforts the drooling, leather-jacketed boy, saying:

“My skin is wrinkled and old, where your skin is smooth and beautiful – because I am at the end, and you are at the beginning…”

and so through the rest of dear Cougar’s facial features. “Because I am at the end, and you are at the beginning,” again and again, rocking back and forth, to the audience’s general glee, while I drum my fingers.

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The Actors Studio’s staging of The Fastest Clock in the Universe does give for socio-political ruminations, however. FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY, warns posters and press material; director Joe Hasham, in his notes, cautions that it “is not a play for the faint-hearted or ultra-conservative theatre-goer. It is a play that, literally, holds no punches.”

The staging is completely devoid of political aggression, but features, among other instances of Moral Degradation (hip-thrusting, manual stimulation of Foxtrot’s genitals, and general homosexual references), a vivid monologue Cougar delivers about his first ejaculation: “I spunked,” he says, and his eyes go misty.

I wonder, considering Malaysian theatre’s tempestuous relationship with the censors, and the turn of recent events concerning the arts in general (Gubra, Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, etc), what the implications are. Does this perhaps mark the arrival of a maturing Malaysian audience: people who heed the warning on labels and take responsibility for their own viewing choices?

The Fastest Clock in the Universe runs at KLPac - Pentas 2 until Sun 11 June 2006. Tel: 03 4047 9000.

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Zedeck Siew is no longer 19.