This excellent production is a slug of rich, complex whisky on a dark and stormy night. Come up the stairs, where the ripped wallpaper has been graffitied by disturbed, creative minds, and take your shabby seat in the musty house of twins Presley (an assured Todd Emerson) and Hayley. 

Artist Philip Ridley’s 1991 playful yet taut psychological thriller explores abject fascination with fragile bodies, and ushered in an era of shock dystopian British plays. 

The scenario is a superior forerunner to Polly Stendham’s 2009 Tusk Tusk: innocents fend for themselves and are afraid to leave the house. In an inspired touch, director Sophie Roberts puts Hayley (the compelling Michelle Blundell) on a tricycle, evoking The Shining and its forever-juvenile twins. [More]

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It’s taken Todd Emerson seven years to mount The Pitchfork Disney, and it’s easy to see why the play stuck with him after his initial reading of it. Premiering in England in 1991, the play is considered a first in the arrival of the “in-yer-face” generation of playwrights, including Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Anthony Neilson. Sophie Roberts’ director’s notes could not sum up the themes and background of the play more succinctly, and it is clear that she has an incredible grasp of the artistic merit of the piece and an unwavering justification as to why it deserves to be performed. It is this understanding and analysis that fleshes out the intricacies of a play which is arguably adelusional illusion of an allusion.

It takes Emerson about ten minutes to drop the gaudy facials, but once he engages in his role as brother and allows his character’s drive to motivate his actions, there is a wonderful simmering in his performance, which culminates beautifully in his dream speech. [More]

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Welcome to nuclear apocalypse circa post-Thatcherite East London. A beacon of a mansion stands in the desolate wasteland, housing two orphaned children (the aptly named Presley and Haley Stray), now in their late twenties, who survive by eating copious quantities of chocolate, recalling past family adventures and telling each other scary bedtime stories, to wile away the time before the sleeping drugs kick in. The real world, however, soon comes crashing through their front door bringing with it disturbing and devastating consequences.

Philip Ridley’s script laid a path for many young modern playwrights (notably Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill) with its grimly abstract approach to storytelling and is now well past its twentieth anniversary. Surprisingly, this is its first airing by any company in New Zealand. Time may have passed, but the dark themes of childlike angst cavorting with adult sensibilities in an apocalyptic nightmare of cocoa and sin, have scarce rung truer. We’ve only to step outside to realise that the garrish fears of two decades ago have become real and the pop cultural end-of-days has been and gone already.

And herein lies the genius of Daniel Williams’ production design of this particular staging. The Q Loft space is transformed the moment we enter the stairwell from street level. Grime and graffiti line the walls of ripped wallpaper and the normally stygian theatre space is transformed into a shambolic living room that has witnessed many better days and had far closer attention bestowed upon it. Theatre doors are not closed, entire space is used to maximum effect of creating the environment. Even the huge picture windows at the street end of the room are used to broaden the space and eventually create a chilling backdrop to one of the many creepy moments of the piece. 

Sophie Roberts’ direction of this deeply horrific monologue-laden script lands some pretty meaty punches at our world caught up in its own narcissistic self-destruction and obsessions with disposability of culture – there’s even a dig at our own reasons for attending theatre as grotesque spectacle, that slides easily across to other modern media. She pulls nuance out of each actor’s performance from exploring the core fears inherent in each (even if one of them is masked for the entirety of his stage time) and sustains a vivid palpable tension throughout.

Todd Emerson never ceases to amaze in his breadth and bravery as an actor. Here he pushes the man-child flailings of Presley Stray into a deeply heart-breaking pathos that has us on his side from the start. His attention to the minutest of details is astounding, even while playing broader brush-stroke moments of the script. Every moment is his, owned utterly and with complete believability. 

As his sister, Haley Stray, Michelle Blundell captures the vulnerability at the heart of the character and gives us the precious heart around which all of the malice that this ghastly world harbours. Her monologues are precisely delivered and controlled to the nth degree. Excellent focus as well on the upstage work while ‘sleeping’, which is always a discipline in and of itself. 

Leon Wadham is slick, sleazy and utterly believable as the predatory, almost vaudevillian, Cosmo Disney. There’s a certain glide to his gait that is an assured sign of a well versed performer and he seems to relish the malicious streak at the core of the character. In lesser hands, the climactic moment of the character (and in turn the play) could become somewhat ridiculous, but Wadham finds a deeply impassioned – if pretty sick – soul to the character that makes it all so frighteningly true.

Gimp-masked, goon-like and forceful, Sam Snedden brings a great amount of physicality and intensity to Pitchfork Cavalier, Disney’s performing buddy and implied bodyguard. It’s a bit of a thankless role, but Snedden’s experience and stage presence carry even though his face is encased in leather throughout his moments on stage late in the piece. 

This play is the fundamentals of nightmare housed in a Pinteresque naturalism, performed by a desperately hungry company at their height in exactly the right pitch and focus it deserves. Such a weighty, darkly warped night of theatre I have not witnessed in a very long time – perfect to stagger out into the street on a stormy winter’s night.

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