Take a bit of Pirandello, Beckett and Ionesco and mix with great involvement! You will get a singular and particularly interesting event – on stage until April 15 at Teatro dell’Orologio. The play “The Pitchfork DIsney”, written by Philip Ridley, translated by Virginia Virilli and Andrea Peghinelli, with Andrea Peghinelli, Elisabetta Pastore, Francesco Mastrorilli e Simone Di Pascasio, eccellently directed by Elena Vannoni. You will deeply experience the comparison between reality and appearance, good and evil, what life is and what you would like it to be. In short, it is a dream or perhaps a nightmare that lived by Haley and Presley Stray, twins in an advanced vegetative state, conned in a one-room apartment of the East End in London, still in a growth stage stopped by the mysterious disappearance of their parents. After that event, during the next ten years, Haley and Presley survived eating chocolate, sedatives, tales and dreams. They go out only to buy the pills that keep them “healthy” and the chocolate that gives them the illusion of love. While Haley spends most of the time sleeping, Presley’s bloodshot and hallucinated eyes suggest us his unhealthy relationship with the sleep and, therefore, with the unconscious. They spend time remembering and rebuilding their own nightmares, in a repetition of their childhood that seems to be endless, but also reassure them, despite being fed by the particular fear generated by their memories. We catch them right when their safeties start creaking. And when the tension reaches its climax, Presley celebrates the ritual of the storytelling: inspired by the city outside the window, he cyclically repeats “his” recent history of the world, according to which they are the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust. The limits of the room where they conned themselves are evident, but the same limits also represent a dark barrier, almost suffocating that protects them from the monsters who are outside. In spite of all, the city beyond those walls intrigues them, but Haley can not stand going out. Forced by her brother and the sedatives, she collapses on a chair, victim of a dazed sleep. Presley, after the umpteenth repetition of his stories, walks to the window and sees a young man in trouble and a strange character who accompanies him: he takes heart and goes down to pick them up. Cosmo Disney enters the room visibly aficted by a stomach ache and immediately vomits. He engage a strange, dazed conversation with Presley. Pushed by his curiosity and ecnouraged by Cosmo, according to whom mankind need to feed on horrors, Presley himself eats a cockroach. But when it may seem that a contact is about to happen, Pitchfork Cavalier – a sort of a dumb elephant man – enters the room. What could it arise out of this series of encounters? Ridley is fascinated by the simultaneous attraction and repulsion for indecent and grotesque stories. In the world depicted by this play we nd the doubts and the fears of not being able to tell who is a friend and who is mortal enemy, whether it is better to conne yourself in a room or rather to come to an agreement with life and swallow “cockroaches”. This is an intriguing and challenging show: don’t miss it!

in Sipario