The Pitchfork Disney
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:21st May '15
Should be back in stock very soon
Philip Ridley's great breakthrough work, reissued as part of Methuen Drama's genre-defining series, Modern Classics with a new introduction by Aleks Sierz.
'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
Against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic dreams, blood-hungry dogs and labyrinthine nightmares, Presley and his twin sister, Haley, eat chocolate and tell each other stories in order to fend off their darkest fears. Everything will be okay as long as they stay together, inside. But then, one night, Presley sees a beautiful stranger through the window – 18-year-old Cosmo Disney – and, while Haley sleeps, unbolts the front door and lets him in.
First produced in 1991, The Pitchfork Disney heralded the arrival of a unique and disturbing voice that single-handedly changed the face of British drama. Vivid and visionary, Philip Ridley’s unsettling and dreamlike play offers a prophetic exploration of fear, sexual paranoia, and living in ‘alternative worlds’.
Published in Methuen Drama’s Modern Classics series, Ridley’s breakthrough work is introduced by Aleks Sierz (author of In-Yer-Face Theatre).
It's one hell of a play, Philip Ridley's The Pitchfork Disney . . . There's a deep artistry here and a searing vividness of imagination that leaves audiences shocked and subtly changed. * 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 *
ISBN: 9781472514004
Dimensions: 196mm x 130mm x 12mm
Weight: 130g
128 pages