Guest Blog: Director Max Harrison on Community, Empathy and Horror in THE PITCHFORK DISNEY

The Pitchfork Disney will mark the fifth collaboration between myself and Philip Ridley, including our production of Leaves of Glass, and Copper Beeches - a world premiere of Phil’s newest play. There’s a deep and personal resonance for me with Phil’s imagination, and a mutual respect between us both; it’s become a relationship I’ve enjoyed immensely over the years.

Now at this stage of our work together, we have a short hand, a pattern, habits and rituals that have formed in our working relationship - cups of tea of Foyles, conversations spanning hours over the phone, early morning Pret meetings before castings. It’s a process of slowly getting to know each other’s imaginations, each other’s reasons for making, our points of view on the world, that means by the time I step in the room to work on one of his plays, we’ve built a great deal of connective tissue, and the work can have a deep synergy to it. The work of rehearsals then becomes about bringing the actors into this stream of imagination, so that the piece we make is a melding of three minds, Phil’s, mine, the actors.

It makes me think about the industry more broadly. There’s something that prevails at the moment, which is a concept heavy, director-led theatre. I don’t mind this, or think it’s a bad thing, but there can be a couple of traps. First, the play can get lost. It takes time, as described above, to settle into a great play, to begin to swim into its deeper waters, to realise things that may have even been unconscious for its writer. Working at this depth takes time, and it takes an openness in approach and preparation.

The danger of an early concept, of an early instinct to ‘do something’ with a play, is that it can stymie this process of deepening, and mean that the more superficial elements of the play are all a production ever deals with, before merrily whacking the chosen concept over the top.

The second trap is that the concept can lead us away from the simplicity of storytelling, and the centrality of the actor. Burdened with a concept and ‘new’ ideas, the story gets muddied and the actors heavy - unable to really release their spontaneity within the confines of a burdening concept that breaks down after scene four. I feel very fortunate to work with Phil, as we both attempt to go deeper into these plays, to find out more about them, and to have a bigger impact on our audience.

A final thought on Community. It’s a blessing to work again and again with the same artists: Phil, and now Ned Costello, who played Steve in Leaves of Glass. In an industry that’s increasingly commercialised, increasingly fragmented, increasingly after star names to understandably deal with a contracting sector - I look around me, to those pockets of the industry that are quietly forming Community.

Directors, actors, creative teams, writers, that work together again and again, out of mutual respect, trust, admiration. I see these relationships as the real joy - and purpose - of the profession. A profession after all, based on empathy. It’s that building of community that the theatre can offer beyond cinema, because we finally invite the audience into the experience of that community every night, the effect of which can be as powerful as the stories we’re telling.

To finish, a word on the play. The Pitchfork Disney is about Fear. And Terror. And the Horror that awaits us outside our own front doors. It asks us to encounter our biggest fears, and see if we can be transformed by them. For lovers of horror movies, it’s the seminal play on how to successfully bring that genre to the stage. We can’t seriously believe in flying ghosts or twisting heads when they’re on stage - as thrilling as the effects may be - but what we can do is encounter the horror in the headlines, the darkness in others, and the shadows in ourselves. The play is a ghost train…we hope you enjoy the ride…