Ron at Riverside Studios – review

If Clockwork Orange were a story about unrequited love, you’d get Ron.

Gentlemen thugs Tony and Mike find themselves in McDonald’s at 10am, still drunk from the night before. When the server has the gall to get their order wrong, they decide they’re going to teach him a lesson. That is, until Tony notices the server’s name tag: “Ron”. The Ron, of Ronald McDonald, owner and mascot. So, instead of just beating him to a pulp, they beat him to a pulp and then they shove him in the back of their car, ready to hatch a much bigger plan.

This is a horrible story, with lots of horrible twists and turns, and horrible characters with no redeeming qualities. That said, Ted Walliker does a fantastic job of keeping the audience hooked. Even while describing gleefully how he rips someone’s lips off because they shouted at his friend, he’s charming and charismatic.

The script is delightfully textured, moving back and forth between the poetic – “They fell eight storeys into the immovable embrace of the pavement” – to the rather more prosaic – “Let’s c*nt these c*nts”. While there’s very little actual violence witnessed – it’s a one-man show after all – it’s so descriptively violent, I feel surprised walking out of the auditorium that I am not, in fact, covered in blood and bits of sinewy flesh.

There’s very little on stage for most of the story, but Walliker makes use of the smallest prop movement to maintain the illusion of change: A microphone and stand are dragged back and forth across the stage, the stand shortened, lengthened, mic detached, re-attached, detached again. Walliker’s jacket comes off, then his trousers, then at some point his trousers are back on, but his shirt is missing, and then somehow we’ve lost the trousers again.

It’s only about three-quarters through that the curtain lifts to reveal a very large prop in a forest. Sure, the “forest” is a bunch of fabric hanging twisted from the ceiling. In only using this massive prop right towards the end, it has the effect of a drastic point of difference.

As the poster states quite clearly, this is not stand-up. But we do begin with Walliker doing a shoddy stand-up set: He admits immediately that he’s quite hungover, and then when he tries to do a proper bit, the audience doesn’t react appropriately for him to do the follow-on bit. It’s all going to pot until he decides he’s going to tell the tale of how he and his friend Mike kidnapped Ronald McDonald.

We do revisit this story-outside-of-the-story, but while it helps to make sense of the narrative at the end, it feels kind of random at the beginning, as though it were still an idea in the making, rather than a solid part of the plot. However, it doesn’t really take away from the main thrust.

An hour is an ideal amount of time to listen to something both morally and physically disgusting. Any longer and I’d start to feel a bit sad. But Walliker, who is responsible for the entire show (along with co-director, co-set and costume and co-stage manager Lev Govorovski), times it perfectly, leaving you with just enough of a nasty taste in your mouth to wonder whether you liked it.