When Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney premiered in 1991, there were discussions about whether a nurse should be on standby for squeamish spectators. After all, during the show cockroaches are queasily crunched, childhood traumas are brought to life, and inexplicable violence turns the outside world into a loveless wasteland. Yet as director Max Harrison’s superb revival at the King’s Head Theatre illuminates, Ridley’s play isn’t a gratuitous feast of horrors; it’s a psychological examination of fear and cruelty, one in which Ridley acts as moral minister – or, in his words, ‘witch doctor’– to a world in need of spiritual resuscitation.
At the centre of the play are the infantile Stray twins, Hayley (Elizabeth Connick) and Presley (Ned Costello) – they are the anti-type of the fearless and virile gangster Krays of East London. After losing their parents in a tragic accident ten years ago, the vulnerable twenty-eight-year-olds have locked themselves away from the frightening world that lies beyond the door of their mouldering flat. Foreigners, sex and nuclear bombs send them into hysterics; chocolate, tablets and sleep provide the only salves. Yet in a Pinteresque turn, one night a stranger crosses the threshold: Cosmo Disney, pub entertainer extraordinaire wearing a shiny red jacket like a sweet wrapper; his seductive beauty conceals a heart of immense darkness and an ego that continually seeks gratification at other people’s expense. Nightmares come crawling into reality; and there’s nowhere to hide from the monsters.
What makes Ridley’s play more than a trippy dramatized version of a Brothers Grimm tale is its commitment to the realities of emotional extremes, particularly that of fear, grief and desire. His characters are living evidence of the ‘survival of the sickest’. And this is a fact that Harrison conveys with aplomb through a light-touch direction style. Every response from his actors feels live and spontaneous; in turn the play pulsates with a nervy, electric energy. This is a great achievement given that Ridley’s script is studded with surrealistic monologues of poetic storytelling, where, in less adept hands, the rhythm might easily stymie.
Throughout the play, the acting is entrancing. William Robertson’s portrayal of Cosmo Disney is fiendishly watchable. He walks into the twins’ flat bringing menacing darkness yet veils it under a calculated pose of lively charisma and prickly flirtatiousness. He’s practically allergic to the concept of ‘friends’ and recoils at the thought of human contact. Nevertheless, emotional manipulation is an art form he has mastered and he enjoys testing his power over Ned Costello’s starstruck Presley, who only half understands his own feelings of sexual desire towards this mysterious stranger. Matt Yulish’s Pitchfork Cavalier is cast to perfection as his brilliantly sinister sidekick. Dressed in a gimp suit and slavishly made to follow orders, he’s like an S&M version of Beckett’s Lucky.
Powerful chemistry is also shared by Connick and Costello’s twins. Their performances lift the play above its dark hues of misery and nihilistic tendencies. Bickering over chocolate flavours aside, some of the best moments in the production are found in the sanctuary these siblings find within their relationship, such as when they ritualistically drop pills in each other’s mouths, a tender (but misguided) attempt at staving off the terrors of reality.
Adding to the sense of suffocating sterility and claustrophobic terror is Kit Hinchcliffe’s atmospheric setting, an East End flat that is a cross between a squalid drug den and a haunted house on an October night. The translucent curtains flutter of their own accord; the sofa and carpet have been bled of colour. It suitably prepares the audience for an evening of dark deeds and uninterred memories.
The Pitchfork Disney at the King’s Head Theatre is a haunting revival of a play that exercised a profound influence on a generation of British playwrights who turned to the stage to express their moral outrage at an epidemic of meaningless violence, culturally induced fear and the void left in the place of religion. Full of delectable baroque poetry and powerful insights about the repercussions of living in a world of horror, this is a production that damns and cautions to incite real change. It feels even more relevant today.
The Pitchfork Disney
By Philip Ridley
Director: Max Harrison
Photo credits: Charles Flint
Cast includes: Ned Costello; Elizabeth Connick; William Robinson; Matt Yulish.
Until: 4th October 2025
Running Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes with no interval
Review by Olivia Hurton
2nd September 2025