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A CurtainUp 
London Review
London ReviewThe Pitchfork Disney
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It’s a ghost train, Mr. Chocolate. People love it. Sitting there in the dark. Having the living daylights scared out of them.
— Cosmo
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Chris New as Presley and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Cosmo (Photo: Scott Rylander) |
Playing the strange 28 year old Stray twins Haley and Presley are Mariah Gale and Chris New. The twins were mysteriously abandoned by their parents ten years ago and no-one seems quite sure what has happened to them. Were they murdered? Why did they not come back?
The play opens with the division of chocolate spoils between the twins and much discussion on the evils of fruit and nut chocolate. If you are feeling bilious at the description of raisin chocolate being like eating chocolate with pieces of skin in it, Presley’s cooking of a live snake in a frying pan is unlikely to settle your stomach.
Presley tells stories about his vision through the letterbox of a post holocaust landscape to the childlike Haley who takes her sleeping medication and curls up in a blanket with a drugged dummy on the living room floor as she strives to achieve “oblivion.” The twins stay awake at night and sleep all day. Presley hears a sick man from outside on the street and lets in the strangely animated Cosmo Disney (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a black man wearing a red sequinned jacket who tells Presley that he and his partner are showmen. Cosmo’s speciality act is eating cockroaches and he throws up on the carpet. His sinister partner Pitchfork Cavalier (Steve Guadino) arrives, a huge man, clad from head to toe in black leather and apparently mute. Presley, who seems attracted to Cosmo, tells him about his nightmare of his becoming a mass murderer called Pitchfork Disney.
The play’s surreal nature baffles and one interpretation is that we are watching a dream sequence of Presley’s own nightmare. Although it is initially hard to derive meaning, the more you think about this work, the more it taunts and engages your thoughts. The performance from Chris New is outstanding, nuanced and subtle and sinister, yet real and believable as he cares for his sister. Mariah Gale too gives a believable and vulnerable glimpse into the life of a girl with arrested development, volatile and childlike. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Cosmo is full of false swagger, unsettling because he seems always to be acting and we have to work out whether it is meant to be like this or not.
Bob Bailey’s set allows the confines of the ordinary East End house where the Strays live with a front door onto the street beyond which we can just glimpse. There are the sounds of the street and eerie music.
I suspect you could return to this play and take away a fresh and different meaning as the only limitation is your whirring imagination. My initial response was confusion and thrilling mystification, except that I knew that I had seen an outstanding performance from Chris New. As I thought about Ridley’s play in the days that followed, it worked its magic and the themes started to form an almost coherent if evolving shape. The post apocalyptic world, oblivion, drug induced responses and screaming in your sleep all resonated with me as I searched for the meaning of Ridley’s play and our own existence.
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| The Pitchfork Disney
Written by Philip Ridley Directed by Edward Dick Starring: Chris New, Mariah Gale and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett With: Steve Guadino Designed by Bob Bailey Lighting: Malcolm Rippeth Sound: Richard Hammarton Movement: Jane Gibson Running time: One hour 40 minutes without an interval Box Office: 020 7503 1646 Booking to 17th March 2012 Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 1st February 2012 performance at Studio One, The Arcola, 24 Ashwin Street, London E8 3DL (Overground: Dalston Junction) |
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