The Pitchfork Disney – review

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Cosmo Disney) in The Pitchfork Disney. Photograph: Scott Rylander

Twenty-one years since its first performance and Philip Ridley’s gloriously disturbing début still pulls no punches. This revival production, directed by Edward Dick, is slickly staged and impeccably performed, a shocking mix of deranged fantasy and psychological realism with Ridley’s brilliantly bilious dialogue simultaneously repelling while leaving you wanting more.

Agoraphobic twins Haley and Presley are traumatised by the unexplained disappearance of their parents. Although adults, they live together in a state of perennial childhood, subsisting mainly on chocolate, deeply fearful of anything outside the grim-looking,cockroach-infested confines of what was once their family home.

In a set that’s half crack den half 1950s semi, the siblings find comfort in telling sinister stories of post-apocalyptic worlds, recalling nightmares featuring crucifixes and rabid dogs. But Presley’s repressed sexual desires lead to the violation of their enclosed living space by the chance visit of two strangers: showman Cosmo Disney, played with thrilling poise by Misfits star Nathan Stewart-Jarrett; and his lumbering henchman of a companion, Pitchfork Cavalier (Steve Guadino).

Chris New excels in the role of Presley, a character who veers from a sense of  inadequacy, getting satisfaction when Cosmo calls him by his name, to committing acts of violence, and whose bizarre fantasies are darkly comedic and disturbing. “You need a good scrub,” Cosmo tells cardigan-clad Presley, whose homosexuality is the white elephant in the room, perhaps the true cause of his self-exclusion from the outside world.

He longs to be touched by Cosmo, who dazzles in a red spangly tux and braces over his naked torso. Whether his relationship with Haley (Mariah Gale) is incestuous we’re left to surmise, but there are certainly hints of it when he administers a tranquiliser to her on a child’s dummy and orders her to ‘suck’. It’s one of a number of unresolved and apparently contradictory issues left, enticingly, in the air.

When Cosmo, who earns a living eating live insects, convinces Presley to munch on a cockroach, his comment that, “The queasier it gets, the more they pay” could cynically be applied to the play, but Edward Dick’s sensitive and brilliantly executed production proves that the issues it raises, particularly about exclusion and homosexuality, are as relevant now as they were two decades ago.

The Pitchfork Disney
Until 17 March
Arcola Theatre
24 Ashwin Street
Dalston
E8 3DL
020 7503 1646