Morrissey, X-Factor and Fear: Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Chris New on The Pitchfork Disney

Morrissey, X-Factor and Fear: Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Chris New on The Pitchfork Disney

01 February, 2012
by: Naima Khan

Naima Khan interviews Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Chris New about starring in the revival of Philip Ridley's The Pitchfork Disney. 

While we wait for his fellow cast member, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, in the Arcola café, I warn actor Chris New that I have a predictable question to ask him and he tries to guess which one: “Am I gay? Do I like getting naked? Were the sex scenes in Weekend real?” Well no, it's about Philip Ridley's The Pitchfork Disney in which he's about to star, but I'll admit that now I'm curious.

Premièred at the Bush Theatre in 1991, The Pitchfork Disney was one of the plays that started the In-Yer-Face period of the 1990s, along with the likes of Sarah Kane's Blasted and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking. Its ugly characters and scenes of cockroach-eating and sexual abuse caused
The New York Times to labour over but also delight in its "grotesque enchantment" while The Observer said "It tingles with nightmares and obsessional fungi”.

The play follows twins Presley (Chris New) and Hayley (Mariah Gale) who isolate themselves from the outside world following the death of their parents. We meet them when they let their guard down and invite the manipulative Cosmo Disney into their home. Played here by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (best known as Curtis from E4's The Misfits), Disney then attempts, in his own dark and relentless way, to exorcise their demons.

More than twenty years after it first opened, audiences are more likely to see the play's relationship to the world beyond the theatre and rethink it in the same manner so many did with the recent revival of Kane's Blasted at Lyric Hammersmith. “Plays don’t exist in a vacuum,” Ridley told me on the phone. “It’s the job of a writer to try to make sense of their place in life, and to make sense of the world that they are living in. You're dealing with something that is both personal and public and you’re trying to find the universal in the personal.”

Take Cosmo for example. Ridley calls him “the antithesis of Presley” and explains that “he has taken what people are afraid of and found a way of spinning it into money, of turning the negatives into a positive. One of the main parts of the play is this dialectic between the two characters – one who is afraid of the world and one who has taken people’s fear of the world and turned into a commercial venture.”

Back in the Arcola café, and it's clear that Cosmo remains a figure we're uneasy with, whilst Presley is a little more palatable. “He's got this messianic element to him,” says Chris of the character he plays. “He's closed himself off to anyone else in the world – a bit like Morrissey. There's a line where he says “I am unique” and that's the key to Presley: he thinks he's the only person in the world like him, and he keeps his sister there because he doesn't really want to be on his own. No one does. But inside he is on his own, he probably listens to Morrissey. But you have to give up Morrissey, you see, you just have to give him up. Stop listening to Morrissey and everything will be lovely. That said, I love Morrissey.”

It's a little difficult to top that Morrissey outburst but Nathan has arrived by now and explains Cosmo's part in purging the comfort of Hayley and Presley's existence. “They're cosy.” he says, “there's safety and a complacency to their lives and Cosmo is there to say 'Hey! There's more to this'. But with these two people alone, shut up in a house eating chocolate, there's a weirdness from the outset. Cosmo does this with every individual, but there's more to it with these two.”

And Chris notes the dark strand of human nature that Ridley has hit upon: “It's how the world works”, he says. “X Factor for example. You're building up people's expectations and fears and we watch as they go through this, as they win or lose. It's never about the singing, it's about the sob story, and the format undermines the experiences of those people. It makes personal experience consumable.”

The link may be more apparent now that so much time has passed since the play's first production, which is what my predictable question was about (not Chris'snude antics). Will The Pitchfork Disney cause the sensation it did back then? Probably not. People will have cooled to the “shock” factor that critics in the '90s wrote about. “You can look at it like a play now,” said Ridley, “it's no longer a series of shocking events” but a play ripe for reconsideration.

Naima Khan