This week’s Corpus lateshow, The Pitchfork Disney, is unnerving from the very beginning. As the audience filter  in brother and sister Presley and Hayley, played by Justin Wells and Victoria Fell, eyed us and each other suspiciously. This feeling of unease only grows as we are brought into the tight enclosure of their world, and see two adults who are stuck in the fantasies and terrors of childhood, fighting over chocolate and constructing fanciful stories about the world beyond their tiny apartment. As the narrative meanders over their mental landscapes, Wells and Fell capture their parts expertly, but there are a few moments in the early stages of the show which seem a touch overdone.

The production takes off, however, when Cosmo Disney, a charismatic nightclub performer, disrupts the sibling’s relative calm. Max Roberts, last seen in Pop Not Broth, builds on his success there with another beguiling performance. The events he sets in motion tip the production from the mildly spooky to the terrifying, as we are told the story of the nightmarish child killer known as “The Pitchfork Disney”. The ensuing crescendo of terror is carried by Wells’ superb command of his role, and when the show spluttered to a devastating finish the audience members turned to each other, stupefied, as if we had all shared some horrific trauma.

As Cosmo says to Presley, everyone is yearning to be scared and challenged and brought out of their comfort zone, and this is exactly what this production delivers. A powerful meditation on a generation of ‘adolescent children addicted to their chocolate,’ the play is dramatised with terrifying vividness and visceral immediacy. The show was entrancing, but perhaps would have benefited from a little more direction in the opening scene, and could have done something more with the white walls of the Playroom to more fully immerse us in the dream-world of the characters’ minds. All in all, this production is well worth seeing, and deserves to reach a much wider audience.