★★★★★

“crackles with emotional tension and twisted humour”

With a twisted title and premise, ‘The Pitchfork Disney’ grips you like a fever dream: disturbing, disorientating and wickedly thrilling. It’s a chocolate-coated nightmare that daring theatregoers will devour – if they can stomach it!

Adapted by Lidless Theatre from Philip Ridley’s 1991 play, ‘The Pitchfork Disney’ explores a tangled world of dependency, domination and stunted development. Set in an unassuming East End living room, we open with Haley and her twin brother Presley bickering over chocolate. This childlike reality soon strains as playfulness yields to violent imagery, apocalypse and self-medication. Their stories don’t add up. Why are there multiple locks on the door? Where are their parents? How old are they? Then Presley lets in an unexpected outsider, Cosmo, shattering their pretence and culminating in a shocking climax.

Produced by Zoe Weldon, Ridley’s 1991 script still packs a punch. The machine gun-like prose hammers the audience with a tongue-twisting intensity, highlighting a Daliesque surrealism. But it’s not oppressive: fractured by sharp wit and brooding poeticism, the audience is deftly allowed up for air in humorous and beautiful moments too.

Max Harrison’s direction is fantastic. You can immediately tell the cast has been expertly drilled as the streams of words roll off the tongue in a heady, breathless flood. The pacing is exquisite: one moment fervid, the next reflective, the expertly controlled flow creates tension between characters and in the unsaid. Harrison keeps up the shock factor, featuring realistic vomit and S&M attire. Though it’s perhaps a sad sign of the times that I didn’t find the climactic scene as shocking – whilst a clear and horrific violation, the media frequently exposes modern audiences to similar (and worse).

The unobtrusive lighting (Ben Jacobs), sound (Sam Glossop), and set/costume design (Kit Hinchliffe) rein in the sensory storm, keeping it grounded and making the turmoil even more impactful.

The combination of stripped back design and manic text really puts the pressure on the cast. And boy do they deliver! Ned Costello as Presley and Elizabeth Connick as Haley tear through Ridley’s script with razor-sharp precision, racing through lines without losing a single syllable. Their opposing styles sharpen their contrasting characters: Costello’s deadpan detachment masks a simmering strain, while Connick storms the stage in an anxious whirlwind. William Robinson’s Cosmo injects a refreshing normality with a devilish, untrustworthy edge. Matt Yulish’s Pitchfork adds rawness: the unsettling physicality and guttural, pained ‘song’ are particular highlights.

‘The Pitchfork Disney’ crackles with emotional tension and twisted humour. It’s by no means an easy ride, but it sure is stimulating and stunningly delivered. Anyone who fancies sinking their teeth into something more exotic will relish it – just read the content warnings first!

FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

★★½

“tackles some fascinating and thorny issues revolving around queer relationships, but its execution is shallow”

Question: ‘Did you ever sleep with anyone else, during the 7 (and a half) years we were together?’

Answer: I hated A Little Life

End Scene

What? That’s not profund? It just makes no sense.

Jake Brunger’s Four Play, as the name suggests, is about the colliding sex lives of gay couple, Rafe (Lewis Cornay) and Pete (Zheng Xi Yong), with Michael (Daniel Bravo)– the ‘hot one’ – and his partner, Andy (Jo Foster). It opens with Rafe and Pete propositioning Michael to sleep with both of them individually, so they can experience sex with other men, having only ever been monogamous with each other. Psst, don’t tell Andy.

Directed by Jack Sain, Four Play’s first act is promising, especially the allure of the opening sequence, in which the three men dance about with exercise balls. Michael quickly agrees to the proposal of one-time sex, and the play follows the devolution of the intertwined relationships between the four.

The second act, however, disintegrated more dramatically than any of the relationships. The primary diagnosis for Four Play is bad writing. Filtered through cliché, the characters are undeveloped which makes it near impossible to provoke interest in their sex lives and their secret liaisons. I don’t take pleasure in devaluing a play that confronts stereotypes about gay men, but this piece felt symptomatic of some of the most depressing facets of our epoch. Though there is ostensible exploration of the emotional tangle of queer open relationships, Andy – supposedly the injured party – is vapid and uncritical, cloaking ignorance with some worthy diatribe against the apparent pretentiousness of liking Ottolenghi and Chablis. That is one of the alarming facets: anti-pretentiousness. Anti-pretentiousness, in this case, is just anti-intellectualism promenading as social commentary.

The actors do their best with the material. Foster is spritely and contrasts well with Bravo’s aloof composure. Cornay is endearing in his awkwardness, also in contrast to the corporate soullessness of Pete. Set and costume design (Peiyao Wang) are highlights, especially Foster’s outfits. The interior décor is suitably chic and modern, complementing the piece’s tone.

The overriding message of the play, Brunger holds, is to respect your partner and always be honest. But there is no plausible redemptive arc for these characters, and they all remain objectionable. The relationships felt symptomatic of our societal objection to feeling and to difficult emotion in the name of ‘protecting our peace’. Not one of these characters have an engaged conversation: they just talk at each other and leave. No one is changed by the end.

Theatre doesn’t have to be radical or revolutionary, but it should be observational in some way; usually, it observes convention from an unconventional lens – in this case, we have sex, monogamy, and ‘modern’ relationships from a non-heteronormative lens. But it lacks nuance. The rusting away of a woman’s ovaries is casually dropped for humour; Hitler and Nazi uniforms as a kink are mentioned in poor taste; metaphors obscure rather than elucidate. At one point, Andy, with lustre, says ‘Spiders are scary. Terrorism is scary. Cancer is really scary. Monogamy?’ As if monogamy could only be held in opposition to these three wildly divergent examples of scariness and thus be deemed unscary. But monogamy can – and perhaps should – be intimidating, and that’s a fascinating discourse in itself, not to be undermined.

Four Play tackles some fascinating and thorny issues revolving around queer relationships, but its execution is shallow.

THE PITCHFORK DISNEY

King’s Head Theatre

★★★★★

“crackles with emotional tension and twisted humour”

THE PITCHFORK DISNEY

King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 2nd September 2025

by Hannah Bothelton

Photography by Charles Flint

Recently reviewed at this venue:

THE PITCHFORK DISNEY

THE PITCHFORK DISNEY

THE PITCHFORK DISNEY

FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

★★½

“tackles some fascinating and thorny issues revolving around queer relationships, but its execution is shallow”

FOUR PLAY

King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 16th July 2025

by Violet Howson

Photography by Jack Sain

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

FOUR PLAY

FOUR PLAY

FOUR PLAY

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