The public, reckoned Cosmo Disney, would relish nothing more than watching public executions on primetime television.

On Monday night, such a fate seemed preferable to dying of heat exhaustion in the sweltering humidity of The Marlborough.

But the cast of graduate actors, who had the task of putting on this intensely morbid piece in just 13 days, gave their audience reason to shiver.

The first act introduced Presley and Hayley Stray, twins whose freakishly dysfunctional existence depended on a diet of chocolate and tablets.

Within the soulless confines of their lounge, they described apocalyptic visions of being mauled by packs of dogs and surviving nuclear holocausts.

"I'd do anything for just a few moments, a few seconds, back in that car," lamented Presley pathetically, unable to accept their parents had mysteriously abandoned them to a lifetime of arrested development.

Such rather overplayed soliloquies skirted unconvincing tedium. But Tommy Chambers' Disney brought the cesspit of despair to life as he made himself at home by spewing vomit across the carpet.

The genetically modified spawn of Eddie Izzard and the Devil, Disney was a waistcoated showman who specialised in eating cockroaches, and Chambers attempted to deliver the scathing condemnation which Presley's twisted imitation of a life deserved.

"Have you ever loved anybody who wasn't a family member?" he asked, exasperatedly. But Hayley had already implied that chocolate was their substitute for adult relationships before slipping into a barbiturate-induced slumber.

Amid the depraved verbal sparring emerged Pitchfork, Disney's masked accomplice and ghost of Presley and Hayley's darkest dreams, who spent most of his time lumbering around the stage with an ultimately comic menace.

Like the character of Pitchfork, this production stood on the border between fantasy and reality, and the audience was left bemused as to which side the frequently unpleasant dialogue belonged.

Producing such a bewilderingly unsettling play in less than a fortnight must have been a Herculean task. Trying to absorb its torrent of slapstick weirdness was almost as testing.