★★★★★

“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!

LEAVES OF GLASS at the Park Theatre

★★★★

“Max Harrison’s staging is beautifully faithful and sympathetic to the writing.”

Memories contain errors. Memory is highly malleable; therefore, often unreliable. It can be altered by emotional state from the very second it becomes a memory. Or many years later. Yet most of us like to think our own recollections are infallible, even when we know we might be twisting it. That’s just survival, according to Philip Ridley who explores these themes in his 2007 play “Leaves of Glass”. The middle episode of his ‘Brothers Trilogy’, it was preceded by ‘Mercury Fur’ and followed by ‘Piranha Heights’.

“Leaves of Glass” centres around two brothers, Steven (Ned Costello) and Barry (Joseph Potter). Five years apart in age, but on the surface, they couldn’t be further apart from each other. Steven runs a successful graffiti removal business while Barry, despite being a bit of a dogsbody in the firm, is a struggling artist. Steven appears to have his head screwed on, whereas Barry’s is lost in drink and hallucinations. Their respective memories of their father, whom they lost at a young age, are on different tracks. Yet there are similarities that bond them. But like similar poles of a magnet, they repel each other. Their mother Liz (Kacey Ainsworth) tentatively holds them together, despite her affections wavering between the two as wildly as her own recollections. The only solid presence is Steven’s pregnant wife Debbie (Katie Eldred) who is aware of the fragility of the family, but her tolerance doesn’t stretch to assuring nothing gets broken.

The intensity of the play comes not just from the spoken word, but the silence that surrounds a traumatic incident from the brothers’ childhood that neither seems willing to talk about. When the silence snaps, the effect is shocking. The pieces come together but nothing fits, as the final battle of memories is like a duel to the death.

“Sam Glossop’s underscore splits the play’s segments like splinters of sound that throw us off balance”

The intensity of the play also undoubtedly comes from the performances. Costello and Potter both capture the inherent danger in Ridley’s script and in their characters. Costello in particular, like a brooding prisoner who never leaves the stage. Neither can escape their version of the truth – a truth that we can only keep guessing about. Eldred’s Debbie, the outsider, is more grounded but not quite strong enough to dodge the fallout from the brothers’ mind games. Ainsworth is a mix of concern and complicity as the mother who inflates her own ability to cope. ‘I’ve buried two parents and a husband’ she continually reminds us, ‘I think I’m capable of carrying some tea and biscuits’. The little hints of domesticity are a thin gauze over the deep cracks that run through this family.

Ridley’s signature is splashed all over the piece, although less shocking, and perhaps more thoughtful, than some of his other work. Max Harrison’s staging is beautifully faithful and sympathetic to the writing. Some scenes are short, like pieces of broken glass. Other scenes start when they are already up and running. They end unresolved. It is discomforting and reflects the unravelling of the minds of these four protagonists. The actors come into the scenes from different angles – as jagged as the eponymous leaves of glass. Alex Lewer’s lighting is just as evocative, swinging from harshness to near darkness like a horror film’s bare light bulb; while Sam Glossop’s underscore splits the play’s segments like splinters of sound that throw us off balance.

It is difficult to tell the difference between a lie and a truth misremembered. This family is built on both – a pretty unstable foundation to begin with. It is not always easy viewing to witness, but the craftmanship of the acting and the writing force us not to look away. Memory may be fragile, but “Leaves of Glass” will be difficult to forget.

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

LEAVES OF GLASS at the Park Theatre

★★★★

“Max Harrison’s staging is beautifully faithful and sympathetic to the writing.”

“Sam Glossop’s underscore splits the play’s segments like splinters of sound that throw us off balance”

LEAVES OF GLASS at the Park Theatre

Reviewed on 25th January 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Mark Senior

Previously reviewed at this venue:

LEAVES OF GLASS

LEAVES OF GLASS

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