Fri 21 Jun 2013 In: Performance View at Wayback View at NDHA
The Pitchfork Disney The Loft at Q, Auckland 20 June 2013 - Reviewed by Jacqui Stanford The Pitchfork Disney is brilliantly sick, stunningly acted and has a set that will have you entranced from the moment you step into The Loft at Auckland’s Q Theatre. Actor Todd Emerson couldn’t get The Pitchfork Disney out of his head after he read it eight years ago. Fitting really, for someone who produced a performance audience members are in turn unlikely to be able to get out of their heads. Todd Emerson As a chocolate-eating, drug-buzzed, filthy and gay-curious man in his late 20s who is stuck in adolescence and protecting his mind-altered twin sister, you barely recognise the red-eyed and sloppy-haired Emerson from Songs for Guy or The History Boys. He giggles and romps around the stage like an oversized kid, playing with his twin sister, who Michelle Blundell delightfully manages to make seem like a drugged-addled 12-year-old. You see, the pair is living in a run-down and chocolate-smeared house years after their parents strangely disappeared. Their strange, anxious existence is turned on its head for a moment when another utterly weird character, the beautiful Cosmo Disney (Go Girls Leon Wadham), turns up, with his creepy gimp-mask wearing sidekick not far behind. The character interaction is sublime, and Philip Ridley’s writing superb. It’s a play that will both disgust you and entrance you, with Emerson’s monologue retelling a bizarre and brutal nightmare so hauntingly done that it will have you on the edge of your seat, couch, or whatever spot you have nabbed in the ramshackle collection put together for the audience. This is a set that will captivate you from the moment you walk from Queen Street and up the stairs to The Loft. We’ll leave you to enjoy it for yourselves, suffice to say you will feel like you are in the twins’ strange, strange existence. Not for the weak-stomached, The Pitchfork Disney will play on your mind. It will leave you with plenty of questions, and no answers. Are they insane? Are they tripping? Is it all a nightmare within a nightmare? And where the hell are their parents?! The Pitchfork Disney is on stage until 29 June, tickets here Jacqui Stanford - 21st June 2013