Review The Pitchfork Disney (Preview)

The Pitchfork Disney
by Philip Ridley

The Way We Live Now
http://shoreditchtownhall.com/theatre-performance/whats-on

Start identifying the characters in Philip Ridley's 1991 shocker The Pitchfork Disney, and it shows how life in the 21st century has caught up with the fractured world of  brother and sister Presley and Haley.

It's a pre-internet play written, or maybe a better word is composed, when the video cassette, not yet digital, camcorder, and video game had come to dominate. 

Yet director Jamie Lloyd's intimate, site-specific production still has the ferocity and grim tenderness to take an audience by the scruff of the neck and finger wag us about grotesque spectacle with violent glee. In the age of YouTube and mobile phone footage it  lasts the course with its moving snapshots.

Parentless Presley and Haley Stray (George Blagden and Hayley Squires) live, apparently, cocooned from the world in a East End grubby family home, dark haired and white skinned like human vampires hiding from the outside.

At 28 years old, they wallow in an infantile existence, craving "chocolate" (hmm, this is probably slang) and "medicine",  bickering and trading stories over who should go out to do the shopping.

These enfants terribles compete in creating - or is it pitching? - stories of extremity and sadism of which imagining themselves sole survivors of a nuclear holocaust is a mild example. Scaring herself with her own stories, Haley is finally tucked up by Presley sucking on a dummy soused with a chemical cosh.

Oh, did we mention that this is a very black comedy - once the audience realised that they were allowed to laugh? ;)  

Presley ventures out, bringing in ethereal blond teenager, Tom Rhys Harries as  Cosmo Disney (the names surely have a significance), a macho-camp pub entertainer clad in sparkling red sequinned jacket with a grotesque variety act and a loadsamoney mentality.

He at first expertly manipulates Presley's emotions. Before he finds his own understanding stretched and moved by Presley but instead of tears leading to empathy brings in a disruptive incarnation of Presley's childkiller fantasies - the brutal, grunting "foreigner",  Pitchfork Cavalier (Seun Shote), part wrestler, part comic strip creation, swathed in black plastic from head to foot.      

Soutra Gilmour's set, arfully-lit by Richard Howell in a traverse immersive space, is spread with faded patterned carpet, keeping the audience sparsely scattered on seating at various heights.

In the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, it's a visceral church nave-shaped design  with an old cooker, a fridge and a misted window located pertinently.

A variety of yellow lanterns with one red one at what could be the altar end light the twilight zone, alongside table electric lamps inhabiting the floors work together to give a chiaruscuro effect.

The furnishings could be left overs  of the Porters' flat in Look Back In Anger. And the church can change to a street. Or a rock concert catwalk or airplane runway or even an elongated wrestling ring or comic strip.

For all the emphasis on Ridley's art school roots, the obvious hooks in film and music and his pioneering break with the past with "In Yer Face" drama ,  this felt to us like a very literary play.

A reptile piece which may be sloughing its skin but still looks back at visual tropes and literature of times past. Even Haley at what could be the altar end, dummy in mouth, is a peverse echo of the baby Jesus without a Madonna.   

The writing betrays its background in art installation monologues. But this is also part of the play's energy when Presley and Haley as opposed to 18 year old Cosmo and Pitchfork clash into each other when 10 years presents a weird generation gap. 

To be honest it did feel a little long at an hour and a half straight through  - but that was because TLT had her own visceral problems. She had opted for a sharp edged block to sit on which unless you are heavily padded she would advise avoiding!

Nevertheless Lloyd paces the production precisely and extracts distinctive performances with staging which manages to keep Squires as Haley in our eyeline even when  almost comatose for long stretches of time on the lengthwise stage.

This play has now become a period piece, just as much as an Joe Orton play or a David Bowie or Mick Jagger movie.

But this element is also its strength for it reflects back on the start of a fast moving yet nostalgic world which has now become strangely familiar  to us. We give an amber/green light and punters may find it worth their while to examine the accompanying Rebels & Rubble exhibition of Ridley's photographs at the East End venue.

Review Karagula

Karagula

by Philip Ridley

Back To The Future

http://www.styx.space/new-events/

Another night, another Midsummer Night's Dream. Well, not quite, but there's something of the lover, the lunatic and the poet trumping the industrial estate surroundings around the newly converted ambulance repair depot venue, The Styx.

This new piece from Philip Ridley and Shawn Soh may be situated in The Styx but belies the obvious pun being a very short walk from Victoria Line and overground Tottenham Hale stations.  The play is three hours or so. And hell, if you can sit through American Graffiti followed by back-to-back Game of Thrones or Dr Who, you'll find this an absolute doddle.

To be accurate the play is Philip Ridley's while the design is Shawn Soh's, but this feels like a piece which started with a storyboard.

An epic seriously tongue-in-cheek post apocalyptic tale, it shares something with Anne Washburn's 2012 Mr Burns which if we want to be arty-farty, academic schmackademick drew on the structure of Boccaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Scheherazade's fate in The Arabian Nights.

However unlike Mr Burns, this piece widens out to a psychic space full of cultural shards against a fragmented, kaleidoscopic human story of life, death and reproduction.

First the fundamentals, or rather the fundament. If you have a bony bum, bring a cushion. TLT's posterior (she can't speak for her gas guzzling companion) is fairly slimline but a bit of seat padding wouldn't have gone amiss.

The action takes place in the cavernous ambulance repair shop   -  in the first act a traverse playing area  with scaffolding and a balcony stage at each end and a transparent cube puled on by a rope. The second act is more traditionally face-on for the audience, single rows of seats sloping down to the playing space, although the patchwork tent backdrop also falls to reveal part of the initial set.

It starts with a dream and voices, maybe from the future, maybe from the past, maybe from a parallel universe, maybe a younger and older mind communing. While there is plenty of inventive visual design to keep one gripped, it struck us as very much a radio play with this template set from the beginning.

Talking of communing, look up at one end balcony and it's a clean cut American Romeo and Juliet or Happy Days (the bubble gum 1950s' series, not the Samuel Beckett version)  couple, as High School teens Dean (Theo Solomon) and Libby (Emily Forbes) neck under two moons. Ah, that's a sign of, of - something - isn't it?

This is a world where everyone seems to be a pinko - no, not secret agents - but dressed uniformly in pink and white in a regimented world of milkshakes, proms, cheerleaders (Emily Burnett and Charmaine Wombwell), hereditary leaders ( Lanre Malaolu with obligatory secret service heavy by his side Obi Abili) and assassins.

Yes, there's also something of Evening At The Talk House in all this but also a touch of The Crucible with an aphid version of a witch trial where the "future is decided on a sting" (it may be pertinent  to comment that in TLT's dystopian state, it's definitely not a thought crime to consider the role of puns).

Of course - shhh, be careful it's a secret! - science fiction dystopias have always been metaphors of and satires on contempory life. This play both taps into and satirizes the current frenzy of fantasy TV series and movies. And in an interesting twist equates official faith based states and the official and unofficial fanatical spin offs with  science fiction, its official and unofficial spin offs and fan fiction. "Religiions and cults spring up so fast", we hear, that followers massacre or are massacred in a day.

It's also about a world where family ties may be discarded and history rewritten for expedient and sterile accounting and recounting but the family tree with its descendants lives on.

If you don't have a mind colonized by popular culture, soaps, conspiracy theories, scifi movies and even Philip Ridley's previous plays,  you may be rather Lost (sorry, pun alert!). You may be Lost anyway but at least you'll have smug fun spotting the references as diverse as  the Hitler Downfall parodies, Dr Strangelove, The Help.

OK, behind it all there's a  straightforward  story with the cards shuffled, dependent on  your willingness to piece together the tale from the swapped scenes' story board.

At the same time it feels very much a work in progress which will probably sharpen up technically as the run progresses - some of the acoustics, for example, in the first act made for inaudibility although one could grasp the main gist of what was going on,

It feels also as if it needs thinning down but not necessarily totally re-shaping because that would undermine its whole point.  Our one thematic (perhaps very personal) proviso is while it's extremely legitimate to criticise America's historical and current actions, domestic and foreign policy,  there is sometimes a danger of subtracting knowledge  by becoming patronising.

Still, there are many moments of arresting images and performances which linger in the mind. It could have been shorter but it's certainly an event which we wouldn't have missed and it's an amber light from we two critical mutants.