Promotional Information

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.

About the Author

Philip Ridley is a contemporary artist, poet, novelist, film-maker and one of the country's most celebrated living playwrights. Ridley has been described as 'probably a genius' (Time Out) and 'the best British playwright of the last 20 years' (Aleks Sierz, author of In-Yer-Face Theatre). His plays include Ghost From A Perfect Place, Mercury Fur, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, and Vincent River.

Reviews

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*