#5. The Pitchfork Disney

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Cosmo
Disney in the 2012 revival.

The Pitchfork Disney by Philip Ridley
Premiere: Bush Theatre, London (2 January 1991)
Published by Methuen Drama

Philip Ridley's debut play, The Pitchfork Disney, was a controversial hit when it premiered at the Bush Theatre in 1991, and Edward Dick's 2012 revival at the Arcola was heralded as a prophecy that had come of age. Aleks Sierz credits it with sparking the new wave of in-yer-face writing during the 1990s from writers like Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. Is all this praise really due?

It is without a doubt a bold debut, announcing the arrival of an audacious new writing talent. Ridley sets it in a dimly lit room in the East End of London, inhabited by infantilised twins Presley and Haley Stray who fantasise they are the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Their agoraphobia is extreme; the only time either of them leaves the flat is to restock on chocolate or the medicine their parents used to take.

"You know why the ghost train is so popular? Because there are no ghosts. Once you know that you can make a fortune." Cosmo

They live stably in the stagnancy of exchanging stories about the past, their dreams, and horror stories of the outside world to keep reality at bay. That is, until Presley spots a beautiful young man on the street outside who is apparently sick, and invites him in. It is Cosmo Disney, a sequinned perfection who makes a living eating insects alive onstage. Cosmo, along with his sinister associate Pitchfork Cavalier, aggressively invades the safety of the twins world. Worse still, Cosmo is drawn to Haley's vulnerability and knows exactly how to exploit Presley's attraction to him.

The power play between the characters is fascinating. Ridley sets up a very dynamic relationship of mutual reliance between Presley and Haley in the first section, before disrupting it in Presley's desire to please Cosmo. Cosmo brings with him a different bag of tricks for surviving the world, which he demonstrates for Presley. His ethos in life is this: "You know why the ghost train is so popular? Because there are no ghosts. Once you know that you can make a fortune."

Mariah Gale (Haley) & Chris New
(Presley) in the 2012 revival.

What is truly impressive is Ridley's ability to marry harrowing psychological realism with poetic fantasy. Presley and Haley have regressed to childishness, living in the house of their dead parents. His depiction of their curious mental state and their desperation to rediscover the comfort and safety of childish innocence, is shrewdly accurate. The centrepiece of the play is Presley's mammoth monologue where he invents the beautiful but cruel child murderer, the Pitchfork Disney himself, in a story which climaxes in the destruction of the world in nuclear fallout, before ending with invincible solitude as the only survivor.

Ridley's writing is intensely poetic. Writing of this potency is rare even in from the more experienced playwrights, yet Ridley shows his unequaled ability to conjure even the most disturbing images. From the sizzle of burning snakes, to the crunch of cockroaches being eaten alive, to the howls of rabid dogs, his imagery is unique, expressive and affecting. There is something primal and visceral in the imagery Ridley uses that doesn't weaken with age - it grabs something deep in your soul and refuses to loosen its grip.

The play itself, in all its surrealist strangeness and storytelling fervour, is like a nightmare itself. It seems to exist in the nowhere world of dreams, where the recognisable is suddenly alien and the cruelness of life is uncensored. Ridley finds a palette of aggressive imagery and characters caught in dream-state. The gothic vision of East London with its echoes of Cold War paranoia, desperate violence and sexual hysteria is rooted in a wider commentary on a society of anxiety and fear. Nothing is gratuitous - it is meticulously economic storytelling. Ridley's prophecy, over two decades on, still feels timely.

What is truly interesting about this play, and indeed all three in the unofficial 'East End Gothic Trilogy' - The Pitchfork Disney, The Fastest Clock in the Universe and Ghost From a Perfect Place - is that for all the imagery of post-apocolyptic worlds and abandonment, the plays are still very much set in the real world. This is interesting when compared to later plays like Mercury Fur which are in fact really set in some sort of dystopian apocalyptic future. The Pitchfork Disney experiments with these ideas, but there is something even more haunting in the fact that they are fantasies in the minds of his characters.

The Pitchfork Disney is a modern masterpiece; it is, in fact, little wonder that it is credited with rewriting the rules of British theatre.

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Cosmo) and Mariah Gale (Haley) in the 2012 London revival.

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Philip Ridley's new play, Tonight With Donny Stixx, will play at the Pleasance at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. Find out more here.