The Pitchfork Disney
Philip Ridley
The Pitchfork Disney heralded the arrival of a unique and disturbing voice in the world of contemporary drama. Manifesting Ridley's vivid and visionary imagination and the dark beauty of his outlook, the play resonates with his trademark themes: East London, storytelling, moments of shocking violence, memories of the past, fantastical monologues, and that strange mix of the barbaric and the beautiful he has made all his own.
The Pitchfork Disney was Ridley's first play and is now seen as launching a new generation of playwrights who were unafraid to shock and court controversy. This unsettling, dreamlike piece has surreal undertones and thematically explores fear, dreams and story-telling. First produced in 1991, it has gone on to be recognised as the annunciation of Ridley's dark and seductive world.
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About Philip Ridley
Reviews for The Pitchfork Disney
Scotsman
A drama that defined the era of "in-yer-face" theatre.
Evening Standard
Ridley's play, with its surreal fantasies, has an edgy, alarming potency of its own, the writing unfettered by any expectations of how a play should be.
Guardian
Flamboyantly grisly first play . . . it blazed a trail for the edgy style that the critic Aleks Sierz dubbed "in-yer-face theatre" . . . in its provocative poeticism, in its mixture of the dreamlike and the dangerous . . . it fed into later works by Jez Butterworth, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and Anthony Neilson . . . a show that both depicts and deconstructs danger
The Times
A cornerstone of the 'in yer face' theatre movement . . . Trauma-riven denial glints darkly in the dank, soiled poetry of Ridley's prose.
Stage
Unsettling and gripping
Sunday Times
A portal through which we access long-suppressed childhood fears from which we emerge with a ghost-train passenger's sense of survival.
Jewish Chronicle