The Pitchfork

Behind a firmly closed door of a sparsely lit and furnished room a brother and a sister, fearful of the outside world, overindulge in chocolate, escape into imaginary post-apocalyptic worlds or into their memories of childhood and their parents. The monotony of their days is interrupted by an attractive entertainer in a glittery jacket who, for pay, nibbles and swallows live cockroaches in front of the audience craving entertainment. The play, in which the author makes use of the horror genre clichés, weaves the images of violence and fear into a surrealistic stage “fairy tale” which his forcedly infantile protagonists dream in their horrendous loneliness, pain and the childlike need for security. The play’s driving force is horror, and it is not clear if this horror is caused by the terrifyingly large and alien world outside of the home, or emerges in the innermost depths of the lonely creatures. Its images evoke disgust, but also fascination: they may be pathological, alien in their sick obsessiveness, but they are scarily close to us all.

The Pitchfork Disney (1991) is the award-winning debut by the London playwright, screenwriter and painter Philip Ridley (1957) and generally accepted as the play that introduced and inspired the so-called in-yer-face theatre. The leading British theatre critic Aleks Sierz, also the author of the foreword to the book edition of the play, believes it to be the fundamental theatre text of the 1990s, representing the demarcation line between the before and now in the field of dramatic writing. The Ripper is a production based on Ridley’s play; in it, the team of authors identified, in the characters, individuals who, locked in their room, pass through different mental phases. The image of any and all of us, who in this modern time of isolation, distress and harsh situations, find ourselves alone with our fears. A thought of characters, set in the modern time, developed, so that we understood it not only as a paraphrase or a symbol, but as Everyman finding himself in an extreme situation.