The Pitchfork Disney by British playwright Phillip Ridley
had a reprise at Monmouth College’s Wells Theatre for two performances last
week. We missed the performances last year while we were in Arizona so jumped
at the chance to take a look at the work of this new, at least to me,
playwright.
The music was loud and bouncy as we crossed the lobby and
treked through a floor littered with what appeared at first to be little rubber
grasshoppers, but later turned out to represent cockroach carcasses. This was
definitely going to be different. We passed through the auditorium and took our
seats on the stage. The two walled set was positioned cornerwise and three rows
of folding chairs surrounded it on two sides. There was now no doubt that we
were going to get an up close, sweat gland experience of what was described by
one London critic as “in-yer-face-theatre.” The two walls in front of the seats
depicted a dirty dilapidated living area in an English city. There was one
curtained door to other parts of the house and a battered entry door secured by
locks, bolts, chains, and a bar that looked a lot like an old cricket bat. The
furniture was sparse and unmatched--a table, some chairs, an old sideboard, and
one easy chair. This was not upstairs or even downstairs at Downton Abbey. It
reeked of poverty and decay.
I’ll jump ahead now and say that we were emotionally
exhausted at the end of the play. For me it was an often jumbled, but still
prophetic, phantasmagoric jumble of dystopian eventualities. Professor Doug Rankin’s director’s notes were accurate.
He wrote that playwright Ridley has called his plays “tuning forks” and that they
vibrated with what is going on at the time.
For me the signal emotion was “fear.” All of the swirling
themes come back to that barred door. Whatever the problem, and there are
multiple possibilities facing the sadly inadequate denizens of this room,
brother and sister Presley and Hayley Stray are faced at every turn by an existential
fear of attack by murderous forces. They
are clearly “strays” ripped out of the world of early Rock and Roll.
Although my tuning fork was vibrating on the current Trump
attempt to jack up violence in his base by creating the threat of foreign invaders
charging out of Mexico to rape and pillage, the fear could just as well be of a
nuclear cataclysm. The characters often look out of the single window,
positioned dead front, into a desolate and still smoldering cityscape. This is
shades of Sameul Beckett’s Endgame.) That
exterior view could also represent an environmental disaster that has finally
killed off almost all living things. (Shades of Trump again.)
Whatever may be outside what is inside is the stoking of
hatred all Latinos, Blacks, Jews, and
anyone other than aggressively straight white people. Intimacy seems only to be
achieved by force rather than respect or sympathy. A final straw is provided by the fear that
more and more of the populace will face these new challenges by drugging
themselves into a stupor. The powerful will encourage this because where there
is no consciousness there is no resistance. All of these themes can be seen and
felt in Pitchfork Disney.
Miles Rose as the caring brother (Elvis) Presley Stray gives an all
out tour de force performance for a young actor. His eyes make him seem a
docile puppy when he receives or remembers, however falsely, kindnesses from
his parents or the threatening visitor. When he erupts it is into frenetic fits
and writhing on the floor.
Amelia Chavez plays (Bill and his Comets) Haley Stray, the often comatose sister. She
has gotten lost at the zoo (think of Albee--indeed think of Fridley mining the
whole of Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd from
Pinter on.) Haley dominates Act I by literally exuding the fragility of the
unprotected in society. Unfortunately this Laura has no menagerie--only pills
and a “dummy.” (a British term for a baby pacifier.) Unfortunately she spends
most of final act asleep under a blanket. I wish she were given a bit more to
do other than be a symbol of victimhood on all levels.
Cosmo Disney is the third character on the scene and seems
to represent the evil intruding class. As played by Declan Crego, he is a
friendly charmer one moment and a Pinteresque threat the next. To keep the
popular music and entertainment idea afloat, he looks like a suitably
androgynous young David Bowie. He enters in a funereal black coat that he soon
sheds to reveal a devilish red sequined jacket. He says he makes a lot of money
by eating cockroaches and other creatures at night clubs. Both he and Miles
Rose execute superior pantomime when the bugs on the floor in the lobby creep
into the action on stage. Even mimed, eating bugs is about as creepy as it can
get. Cosmo, like Presley, alternates between strangely passive behavior and violent
outbursts. He lulls Presley into believing that he will guard and protect the
sister and sends him off with his henchman Pitchfork (Richard Eyre) to buy
chocolate and medicine. Presley is barely out the door before Cosmo is raping
the comatose Haley. Trust is dangerous and futile in dystopias. All that is Disney is turned on its head.
The final character is labeled the Pitchfork Cavalier and
played by Richard Eyre. He is Cosmo’s henchman and driver. He may be the most frightening of all the characters. As
an actor he is a ferocious hulking presence complete with a coal black Hannibal
Lector mask. He is a blunt force killer absent all rational communication. A
Cavalier is often seen as a dashing mounted soldier, but this scary hulk can
only sing a few notes of a song after struggling to climb atop a chair. Tis very
curious and bizarre to think here of another Absurdist, Eugene Ionesco, and his
play The Bald Soprano, which
disintegrates into gibberish at the end. Eyre's silence is somehow more moving and gut wrenching
than all the others who spew torrents of words in endless monologues.
He is a pitchfork serial killer who stabs children
and leaves behind a Mickey Mouse doll. In this world we are battered with
a traumatic reversal of the Disney mythology. There are no gay songs, bright
colors, or lovable blue birds here. The walls are gray, the violence is
gruesome, and we are in the world of Grimm and Hansel and Gretel are being
chucked into the oven.
Kudos to the pasty green light that often accompanies
looking out the window and to the steamy red that accentuates the rape scene.
Also a congratulation to whoever managed the contrast between the black Lector
mask and those soft white hands with black nail polish on Richard Eyre.
You cannot truly like this play. It portrays a world so dark
that some might doubt there is any valid solution. Should our coming election
put no check on the Trumpian dystopia, we may indeed have to consider trusting
no one, barricading ourselves from the outside, and taking our pills. I must admit I would like to see a bit more light at the end
of the tunnel. Act II goes on too long. Monologists are at heart too taken by
their belief that audiences want to hear everything they have to say.