The Pitchfork Disney – King’s Head Theatre

“Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear / and fear is the most divine emotion.” Zora Neale Hurston’s sermon-like words, which open The Pitchfork Disney’s epigraph, paint fear as a sacramental rite in the pursuit of wisdom. Fear allows us to know truth; it is holy because it is the realest thing there is. Pitchfork’s characters live in the realm of dreams, but their words are devastating precisely because they touch the darkest knowledge each of us carries in our gut: we are afraid, and we are right to be.

Philip Ridley’s debut play is often credited for sparking the ‘90s ‘in-yer-face’ British theatre movement. Its influence extends to the likes of Sarah Kane and Jez Butterworth: the blood, guts, sex and violence that is so unflinchingly depicted in Ridley’s script carries over into Kane’s Blasted, and Butterworth’s Mojo borrows Ridley’s styling, language and use of symbolism to create the iconic sparkly-jacketed Johnny Silver. Still, it took years for the text to be picked up by a publisher, and even longer for it to be broadly recognised for its importance. Nearly thirty-five years on from its premiere, Pitchfork plays the King’s Head Theatre in a new production by Lidless Theatre.

The play takes place over the course of one night in a musty living room in East London. It’s the family home of 28-year-old twins Haley and Presley, hermits who live a strange existence centred around apocalyptic storytelling and a childlike love of chocolate. They are governed by fear, stuck like an old photograph in the moment when they lost their parents ten years previously. It’s only when a dazzlingly beautiful stranger appears at the window that Presley’s intrigue gets the better of him, and he unbolts the door to the horrors of the outside world.

Pitchfork is not only about fear – it is also genuinely scary. Storytelling forms part of the many rituals and routines that make the twins feel safe, and Ridley takes full advantage of this with some of the richest, longest and most moving monologues I have ever seen onstage. These monologues tend to recount dreams, memories or things that fall somewhere in between: but in the end, they all come from the very real place of trauma born from the death of the twins’ parents. Haley describes a wild dog chase complete with Biblical notions of sin and redemption; Presley recalls frying his pet snake alive as a child, watching its eyes pop out of its head and eating it with a knife and fork; and finally, in his eponymous Pitchfork Disney monologue, he narrates his recurring nightmare, which begins with his teeth falling out, and, via a surgery that gives him the face of a serial killer, ends with the nuclear apocalypse. Brilliantly, this latter monologue is a five-page, uninterrupted response to the question: “What happened to your parents?” The stories’ specific details may be surreal, but their emotional driving force is firmly rooted in reality.

Parts of the show resonate so strongly now that it’s hard to believe they haven’t become grimmer with time. The violence described in unsparing detail by the twins and Cosmo in their dreamstate is constantly visible on our newsfeeds. In a particularly chilling line, when lauding the profitability of disgust, Cosmo suggests that we should “televise executions”. Not so dystopian to anyone on social media. The climate of fear prophesied by Ridley in this work manifests in an ‘us vs. them’ attitude from the twins to the extent that they have literally spent ten years with the door bolted to anyone except themselves. Haley’s response to her brother’s description of the gimp-suited Pitchfork Cavalier as “foreign”-looking goes: “Foreign! […] They’re dangerous and different. They beat up women and marry children.” Audiences in 1991 might have hoped that these gut reactions to fear would be less pervasive thirty-five years later, but Ridley knew otherwise.

Every aspect of Lidless Theatre’s production comes together to foreground Pitchfork’s extraordinary script. Ned Costello and Elizabeth Connick’s neuroticisms are perfect for Presley and Haley, and yet each is able to fully unleash their inner terror when the writing calls for it. No opportunity to provoke horror is missed: when Cosmo (William Robinson) eats a cockroach, as is his profession, we can actually hear the crunch of its shell between his teeth. Pitchfork (Matt Yulish), who doesn’t speak, steals the show when he “sings” his “lullaby”, a beast-like howl that erupts from the depths of his soul and slowly crescendoes over the course of about a minute.

Aleks Sierz’ 20-page introduction to the Methuen Drama edition of the text scratches the surface of what is a profoundly rich work that has meaning far beyond its dreamy, image-laden coating. It’s hard to summarise in 800 words, but Lidless Theatre does a remarkable job of letting the play speak for itself. An extraordinary piece of work about fear, trauma, sex and death that will have resonance for generations to come.

Reviewer: Holly Sewell

Reviewed: 2nd September 2025

North West End UK Rating: